


In the Hot Summer Sun

by softieghost



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Aged-Up Yuri Plisetsky, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Fae & Fairies, Genderfluid Yuri Plisetsky, Getting Together, Ghosts, M/M, Magic-Users, Magical Realism, Psychic Abilities, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, Urban Fantasy, by the way, the occult as nuisance, this is not a body swap or a your name au, this is somewhere between cryptic americana and traditional urban fantasy, yuri just wants to go to work and ignore all the weirdness but no one will let him
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-03 00:24:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11520639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softieghost/pseuds/softieghost
Summary: Yuri Plisetsky just wants to go to work. Unfortunately for him, sometimes he wakes up as other people but it's fine, it's whatever, no big deal. That is, until he wakes up as a boy with an undercut who just might be in danger.





	1. More of the Same

The first thing Yuri noticed was the sound of someone breathing softly in his ear. That was usually what he heard when he woke up like this - someone else's breathing, or someone else's voice. Sometimes it was someone else screaming at him to open his eyes or a mother trying to wake their child with tears in her eyes. Most of the time, though, it was just a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of wake up and get on with your day type of morning.

The breathing next to him was slow and even, probably indicating the other person was asleep. Yuri peeled his sawdust dry eyes open very slowly, not wanting to surprise anyone that might be watching if he was also supposed to be asleep.

The second thing he noticed was the neon green sign in the shape of a UFO on the wall above a wooden door that was staring him in the face when he opened his eyes. Everything else indicated that he would have been in a professor's office if it weren't for the light-up sign. There were shelves of books and an impressive looking desk with an empty computer chair behind it sitting at an angle like someone had just gotten up. Two framed degrees hung on the wall behind the desk. Yuri was laying on a couch in the office, so it may have been a therapist's room. That still didn't explain the glowing space ship hanging up above the heavy wood door, closed, trying to trap him inside.

The breathing next to him turned into a soft snoring. A man with messy silver-white hair falling in his face was slumped in an armchair next to him, practically dead to the world. His notebook was open beside him on a small table but the writing was in an alphabet Yuri couldn't read. There were only a couple of things he understood about these little visits he did and the first thing he had learned was that he stopped being able to read, even if the language was English or Russian. He could understand anyone speaking English to him, or Russian even if he was rusty in his own life but reading his own name while he was trapped in someone else’s head? Nope. Gone. Done.

The man twitched in his sleep and made an open book, in the same indecipherable alphabet on his lap, fall onto the floor with a flutter of pages and a thud. The man opened his eyes with a start.

"Oh dear, sorry Sophia. I didn't sleep well last night." The man muttered as he righted himself and straightened his jacket. His voice was casual and light but he looked sheepish, eyes apologetic through his thin reading glasses as he peered over at Yuri.

"It's okay. Actually, do you mind if I go to the bathroom?" Yuri asked, hearing a soft and feminine voice come out of his mouth. That was his usual response when things like this happened - _sorry, I don't feel well, let me leave so I can look at myself and try to figure out where I am without freaking you the fuck out._

"Of course. It's just down the hall." The man waved him off while he looked through the notebook on his lap.

In the women's bathroom, just a couple of doors down, Yuri looked at himself. He had short brown hair, this time, and it was curled up around his face in a way that made his round, womanly body look even rounder in the sallow light of the lady’s restroom.

Great.

The first time it had happened Yuri was 12 and woke up in the body of a Chinese boy named Guang Hong. He thought he had died. He came back to himself after only a couple of hours of “visiting”, as he now called it, and when he told his mom that he had woken up as someone else she told him to stop smoking weed despite lighting a joint at the kitchen table and blowing smoke into his face. She didn't care how young he was when it came to drugs because she was a shitty mom and a shitty person. She liked to pretend, though, so she tucked his long blonde hair behind his ear and kicked him out of their worn-thin apartment so she could make some money without him hearing.

It happened for the second time six months later. He woke up in the body of an older man with a long ponytail in Italy with rollerblades strapped to his feet and, apparently, a death wish.

It became more frequent as he got older but he could never predict when or why it was going to happen. Despite the frequency he refused to tell anyone, even his Grandpa, whom he trusted with everything else in his life. Saying "Sometimes I wake up as other people" was sure to get him put in some dark and dank hospital; it was a guarantee that the only sunlight he would see would be through the eyes of the strangers whose bodies he stole for hours or days or, once, an entire week.

His mom had told him he came out of her dead and blue but breathed and screamed after minutes of the doctors pressing onto his tiny chest while she prayed aloud to any god that would listen. Sometimes he wondered if that had been the first time he woke up as someone else - if whatever he was wasn't Yuri Plisetsky at all but something else that just liked this body more than anyone else's. It was an alright body, maybe too small and too girly, but it was okay, even though he smoked and drank with the boys down the street and even though he worked at a diner when he wasn't old enough to. The owners never paid any mind to his real age when he first started, though, so he made good tips even as a kid because he was young and cute and fast.

This body, though, this Sophia, was middle-aged and felt tired and sad and her left knee hurt like she was recovering from an injury. He needed to find out where she lived as soon as possible so he could get back to his own body.

The second thing he knew for sure about his visits is the only way to get back to his own home was to break something precious to the person he was invading. The hurt usually flung him out.

He hurried his fat body, stuffed into kitten heels and a flowing shirt that was probably sold to her as "flattering to her body type" but just made her look like a floral lump, back to the office of the therapist. He was sitting at his desk, now, and rifling through some paperwork that was stacked as tall as he was. Books, pens, paperclips, folders, and all number of things littered his desk where he worked but he grabbed loose odds and ends without looking for them, muttering to himself all the while.

"I'm not feeling well. Do you mind if I leave?" Yuri asked, hoping that was an okay thing to say in this situation. He had never been to therapy before.

"Of course my dear, that's perfectly understandable considering your situation." The doctor replied, not looking up from what he was working on at his desk.

“Thank you, um…” Yuri started before realizing he had no idea what this man’s name was and asking was probably going to be very embarrassing for Sophia the next time she came into his office. He could feel her heart pounding in his chest already.

“I told you last time, just call me Dr. Nick.” He said with a wave.

Yuri turned to pick up what he assumed was his purse, a huge floral tote bag, stuffed full of paper and notebooks in designs that only a middle aged women would think were fashionable, and stepped towards the wooden door to leave, eyes flickering up to the glowing UFO sign.

"Why do you have this?" Yuri asked, pointing up to it.

Dr. Nick finally looked up from his stacks of loose papers and fixed Yuri with a piercing stare.

"Again, as I told you last time. Bigfoot is real, my dear, and he’s out there, somewhere.”

 

* * *

 

The lady, Sophia, had American dollars in her purse. At least he was still in his own country, not that he knew what state or city he was in. It was annoying to lose the ability to read even though he could understand English and Russian fluently when he was in his own body. It just made for the whole ordeal to be even more annoying that it would be _with_ the ability to read.

Sophia's phone buzzed with a text that Yuri couldn't decipher.

Yuri exited the building he was in – a tall office space with shuddering elevators and a disinterested security guard at the front - and stepped onto a busy city sidewalk. He squinted into the bright sun and rifled through the purse for sunglasses, finding some with tiny pink rhinestones embedded into the corner. The bright white light of the sun was turned a dim yellow through the shades as he looked around, trying to get his bearings. On both sides of the street were old, converted buildings. There was a blue and yellow historical marker in front of one of them so he was probably on the East Coast, at least, not that that helped him much.

More often than not he stayed in his own city but he had learned to never assume. There were a lot of half-ancient half-modern cities up and down the East Coast like his own Philadelphia and assuming he knew where he was had never been helpful. If he could see the skyline for the trees it would be one thing but the three-story rowhomes in front of him blocked all but the clouds.

Cars zipped past him as he continued to look up and down the streets, probably looking as lost as he felt.

He was hungry, too, but he wasn't sure if that was really him or Sophia wanting food. Either way, he needed to eat soon so he could focus on going back home to make his shift at the diner. If he was early enough he'd be able to stop by Grandpa's shop and say hi, too.

The sidewalk was cracked and broken in places which made walking in Sophia's ugly purple kitten heels quite difficult. Yuri could walk in heels alright on his own but being thrust into someone else's body and then thrown out onto a lopsided sidewalk made him stumble and limp like he was drunk. As the street became cobblestone (okay, almost certainly still in Philly) he could barely stay upright and ducked into the first café he could see.

The good thing about waking up in America is that he didn't need a menu to order. It didn't matter that he wouldn't have been able to read it because there isn't a single American dining establishment without a burger available for him to scarf down whenever he needed it.

He pushed through the chipped green door into what felt like a freezer. Sure, it was hot outside but this was a little overkill – he felt goosebumps run up and down Sophia’s arms almost instantly while the sweat on her face dried down tacky and uncomfortable. The café was painted in light greens and off-whites and had plants in the windows along with signs likely advertising poetry readings or plays or other such dramatic shit that Yuri hated but would fit right in with the décor. None of the chairs matched and most of them were just worn-out couches thrown in corners or ottomans up against walls. The tables were covered in ugly, chipped mosaic tiles.

Most of the people in the café looked like they were in their twenties. They all had piercings and visible tattoos and weird haircuts that were only acceptable in the middle of an urban sprawl; it was all smog inspired hairdos and impulse ink from the shop down the street. There was a woman with red hair, half shaved on the side like she was cool at the front counter. She did a double take when she spied him, making his breath hitch, and her eyes tracked him as he walked like she was waiting for him to do something stupid. Before he could bump his borrowed body into the counter she smiled down at him, blue eyes shining, and leaned in far too close for any self-respecting service worker.

"You look uncomfortable in that body, kid." She breathed into his ear.

She turned away from him and walked into a back room before he could pick up his jaw and ask her what the fuck she was on about. His heart was pounding in his ears and his chest felt heavy, not just from the uncomfortably large breasts he was now sporting. When she returned through the rattling beaded curtain that separated the work station and back room she had a bottle of water in one hand and a friendly, pitying smile on her face. The bottle was cold and condensation dripped into Yuri's palm when she handed it to him but he let the water gather there, too stunned to care.

"You stuck here?" She asked. She sounded nonchalant, like this was a normal fucking question. If Yuri were himself he's be screaming at her already, _just tell me what's going on_ , but he wasn't himself and so he had to feel all of _her_ emotions too and she was sad and hurt and wanted to shy away from the red-headed woman.

When Yuri didn't answer she cocked her head and laughed through her nose.

"Never meet someone that could see through ya, huh?" Her smile was big and toothy and dangerously white. Her eyes continued to sparkle no matter how she turned her head to laugh.

The woman walked around the counter of the café and pointed Yuri to one of the ratty, threadbare chairs in the corner. He had never, in his life, met someone that could do something like him and he sure as shit had never come close to even thinking that there was someone out there that might be able to see through him when he was in someone else's life. He felt red-faced and hot thinking that maybe someone before, years ago, would have seen him and not helped him. The woman's sadness pushed down his anger, though, and he felt like crying.

"Lemme get you something to eat." The woman offered before Yuri could stop her to ask what was going on. She walked into the back room again while Yuri sat in flustered silence. There was a man two tables over with a tattoo on his face who grinned at him hungrily, making him shiver not from the freezing cold air but from something else he couldn’t quite name. As a poor excuse of a distraction he dug through Sophia's purse and blinked away the pricks in his eyes. He wanted to be mad but he couldn’t muster it - at best he could do flustered or irritated which was alright, considering the situation. Feeling other people’s feelings all the time was a hassle.

Sophia had $47 dollars in her wallet, along with a lot of loose change and her keys. There was a tube of cheap lipstick and a tube of equally cheap lip balm tucked into a side pocket along with some thick pads that Yuri quickly put back, frowning. She had a phone that Yuri couldn't get into because he still couldn't fucking read English yet. There was a sketchbook full of drawings of people and half-finished flowers along with a spiral-bound notebook with scribblings in it.

The drawings in the sketchbook started out normal enough – portraits and small sketches tucked together in ways that indicated random doodles instead of purposeful practice. They were neat and tidy the way you were taught to draw in high school but as he flipped they got darker and the lines got thicker - people’s faces became distorted in ways that put Yuri’s nerves ablaze. The last page was a big, inky mess, with nothing but an eye and a mouth visible.

Awkwardly putting the sketchbook down he looked around at the café once more. The man with the face tattoo continued to stare at him. He wanted to scream at him but Sophia was scared so he trained his gaze forward and waited for the red-headed woman to return. When she did, finally saunter back, all legs and hips and sass, he let out a breath he hadn’t been intentionally holding.

"How old are you?" She said as she sat down in the chair on the other side of the low, scuffed table.

"Seventeen. Almost eighteen." He answered before biting into the hot sandwich the woman put down in front of him. Grease and mayo dripped down from the corner of his mouth and the man at a table near him turned to look away, finally, grinning into his phone. His teeth were black.

"What's your deal?" She prompted, leaning back into her chair with an eyebrow quirked up high enough to reach her hairline. Her face kept changing, reflecting every tiny bit of the conversation, like she was really interested in Yuri's bullshit.

"Sometimes I just wake up as other people. It's annoying as hell. What about you?"

"I can see the truth, like, through glamours and shit. How do you get back?"

Yuri wanted to match the woman’s presentation here, cool and calm, like he wasn’t some dumb kid. But he was nervous and his stomach was churning with every bite he forced himself to take. He bounced his left leg up and down in a rapid beat as they talked.

"I have to break something they don’t want me to, or hurt them, or whatever. Make them shocked so I get pushed out."

At that she got up, hair swinging around her face, and went behind the counter again and into the back room without another word, leaving Yuri alone. He tried to calm his breathing before she came back, focusing on his vision, blurry around the edges, which meant it was going to be an easy trip home so long as he could figure out where Sophia lived. That was always the hardest part - getting to their house and finding something they cared about and fighting them down as they tried to get him to stop from doing what he needed to.

He ate fast despite his bubbling nerves, devouring the overcooked meat and cheese and bread, so by the time his food was almost gone the woman was back and pressing a business card into his hand. The card was all black with white writing and a little design on an eye on one side that seemed to wink at him whenever he flipped the card over.

 _Mila Babicheva. Call for help._ It said, listing a phone number underneath.

"You'll be surprised at the kind of people you can meet if you learn to look beyond your own nose. Oh and, a regular phone won't work for that number. You'll need to get a board."

"Board?"

"You know, a Ouija board? They're not all haunted and spooky and shit like in the movies. Just get one from Target or whatever."  She waved her hands as she spoke, brushing off Yuri's question.

"Oh. Uh. Mila. Can you help me with something?"

Mila found Sophia's address in her phone, laughing at the fact that Yuri couldn't read it, and sent him on his way with another water bottle tucked into the floral bag as a party favor. The sun was hot on his back as he walked (hobbled) down block after block to the woman's home. She lived close, thank Christ, since his feet were screaming for relief in the purple shoes he was stuffed into. There was no way they were the right size.

Yuri walked through what must have been the older part of the city on his trek to Sophia’s house. Despite living close to the city proper he rarely ventured in except for when he woke up here and even then he ventured right out to get back to his own body but he wasn’t surprised to see people dressed up as colonial settlers and Revolutionary soldiers milling about in the roads as if they weren't afraid of the cars or horse-drawn carriages that rattled down the brick and cobblestone streets and who lay, sprawling, on the lawn of tourist traps and tiny museums while travelers took photos of every pebble on the ground, crowding Yuri on the broken sidewalk.

 _Old City isn’t even that interesting_ , he muttered to himself.

He went through Chinatown, too, and felt a little bit of relief at not being able to read anything he normally couldn't. It was a weird feeling.

Sophia’s house was on the other side of everything, tucked away down a side street off of a side street. Her keys were painted with purple nail polish and it took Yuri three tries to get into the house, praying no one would be home. He was in luck, it seemed, because only two cats greeted him at the door, twining themselves between his stocking-clad legs, as he walked in. There was another cat on the back of a sofa and yet another mewling for food or attention in the kitchen. Yuri grinned, stretching the woman's face tight, because cats were the _best._

The rest of the house was plain. No pictures of anyone hung in the rooms and there weren't any fancy bath products, typical of lonely women, in the bathroom. There was barely food in her fridge. The house looked like she tried to spend as little time in it as possible, simply coming home to sleep. _How sad_ , Yuri thought.

Her bedroom, on the other hand, was almost entirely lavender. This room had some personality, at least, so he felt a little sour at going through all of Sophia's specially laid out and organized possessions. The bed was an ugly white four-post, probably from Ikea, and matched her white dresser. There were fairy lights strung up and a corkboard with a calendar pinned to it on the far wall. One tiny framed picture, barely noticeable was propped up on the dresser - Sophia and a young girl, other signs of which were nowhere to be found in the house.

Seeing the picture made him feel Sophia's sadness well up again so he turned away from it and pawed through boxes of clothes at the bottom of the closet but found nothing that looked special enough to destroy. Sophia’s heart stayed in the same, slow beat as he wandered around the room and looked through everything for any kind of clue into her personality, but the only thing he could feel apart from her gaping nothingness was a tender heartbreak when he looked at the picture on the dresser. 

“Jesus fucking Christ.” He said aloud to no one as he picked up the framed picture and dropped it on the floor with a crash loud enough to hurt his ears. The room went black and he smelled his mom’s mac and cheese, the only thing she knew how to cook.


	2. First Visit

Mom was screaming about something while Yuri blinked into the sharp light of the lamp in his room as he came back into his own body. She was always screaming about something these days - about food, about bills, about Yuri's attitude, about anything at all that she could get into her hands and work to a pulp. Even though she was still relatively young all the yelling had turned her hair nearly entirely gray which she sometimes covered with red dye when money was good, and she had tired little wrinkles around her eyes from smoking too much and drinking too much and not sleeping enough. 

Yuri could smell smoke, now, too which likely explained the screaming. He rubbed at his temples and caught sight of himself in his mirror. The small crack in the upper corner distorted his face into two separate images which only served to highlight how ragged he looked. He hadn't washed his hair in a couple days and there were bags underneath his green eyes. He looked like his mom.

Irritated already, between the strangeness of today and the fact that he was likely going to be late for work, he pushed himself off of the edge of his bed where he was sitting, refusing to wonder what his body did while he was gone from it, and picked up his work shirt from the floor and put it on before throwing a beaten old flannel on over it. It was too hot to wear it comfortably but he hated the stupid  _Heaven's Diner_  shirt and we wasn't about to wear it out in public if he didn't have to. He tugged on yesterday’s pants and toed his black boots on, too, and scraped his hair into a long ponytail before he opened his window and crouched out onto the fire escape so he could leave without having to talk to mom. He'd get yelled at about it later but he'd get yelled at for interrupting her if he went out into the kitchen, too, so there wasn't much point worrying either way. 

The fire escape was hot from baking in the afternoon sun and rust flaked off onto Yuri's hands as he grabbed the railing to right himself. He could see out over his neighborhood and, in the distance, the skyline of the city center from up here. It had become his favorite place to smoke weed and read stolen comic books and draw, once in a while, when he had the energy to sit and think about it. He'd wanted to go to art school for a minute as a kid but that dream had been pushed out of his head very quickly by third shifts at the diner and daily lectures about his inability to do anything right by his mom.

Still, though, the small stoop created by the worn steel was nice to sit on when he had the time.

Yuri clanked down the ladder as far as he could go before he had to jump the last few feet to hit the pavement, sending little shocks up to his knees as he landed. 

The apartment sat above Grandpa’s shop but he barely had time to wave through the dark, barred window as he started to walk down the street to the diner. 

Although the sun was melting into the distant city haze, lighting up the clouds orange and brown through the smog it was blistering hot and Yuri was already sweating under his flannel that he refused to take off because he looked good in it and it hid the dumb logo on his back from the work shirt. 

The old lady, Ekaterina, that lived next door waved at him as he walked even though her eyes were snow-white and had been since he was just a kid on his Grandpa’s back. She seemed to see everything, though, images of the town reflecting upside down in her eyes whenever she turned to look.

Mikhail was on his porch smoking and if Yuri wasn’t late he would have stopped and bummed a cigarette but instead he just waved and the other teen nodded at him. They were in silent agreement most of the time about the state of their town – shitty, too hot, and awful. It was their most-used topic of conversation. 

A block down there was a dog on the loose, a small poodle, just begging to get hit by a car coming too fast around the corner, driven by some kid that thought they were cool because their Russian parents didn’t look after them.

The whole town here was Russian. Some of the people that lived in the middle of the city refused to come up here because they all assumed the mafia ran the streets and some pakhan would get them for crossing the street the wrong way. They were all idiots. The wort people here were the drunk husbands and the women like Yuri’s mom who said they tried everything they could to improve the lives of their families but just sat back and smoked in their kid’s faces all day. The fucks that lived down near City Hall or on South Street or up in the high rises that were being built taller every year stayed away, spooked by the white folk who didn’t speak their language the same way they were spooked by the black folk who did up at Susquehanna and Dauphin. 

Yuri stepped in a puddle and soaked his sock through a hole in his boot that he had been meaning to fix and turned the corner to walk through the parking lot of Heaven’s Diner to the employee’s entrance in the back. Takeshi was leaning up against the back door finishing a cigarette. 

“Yuri! You’re late again. What’s your excuse this time, hm?” He frowned down at him like a father would.

“I dunno, overslept or something. I’ll stay late alright?” Yuri said as he pushed past his boss into the kitchen. Takeshi grumbled something behind him that he couldn’t hear and didn’t care to do so.

Yuri dropped his bag in the employee’s room, past the kitchen, and stuffed his sweat-damp flannel into it before heading out to the front counter where Yuuko was likely standing, tired and achy, wanting to go home to the triplets. She eyed Yuri but didn’t say anything when he pushed past the swinging gate to take over at the register and coffee maker, not that many people would be getting any in the evening. 

The diner was nearly empty. It was just past the dinner rush and too early for all the night workers to come out so Yuri was able to sit in relative silence for a while, listening to nothing but the soft clinks of silverware against dishwasher-ruined plates and the beeps of the register as he rang the occasional patron up for their steak and fries. In the silence Yuri thought about Mila, about the girl that had seen through him, and felt the anger he had wanted to feel at her in the café bubble up. 

He was infuriated, if he was honest with himself, at her smug attitude and the idea that someone else could have seen and _known_ when he himself had never known in that way. He had always been alone with his annoying and dangerous “gift”. No one had ever reached out to him so he was forced to manage on his own, waking up in different countries as different people without any warning to pattern or help. 

Mila’s toothy grin floated behind his eyelids. He promised himself that he would get up in the morning and find her again if it killed him. 

Yuri looked around the diner as he seethed, trying to calm himself. His anger had long become a comforting blanket wrapped around his shoulders but in the summer heat it would be too easy to let himself boil in his own skin so he pulled a cool breath through his nose and let it out through his mouth the way his old dance teacher had taught him before he was forced to quit. 

A sullen-looking man in a rainbow sweater was in a far booth, eating by himself. He looked like he was doing math in his head and wasn’t particularly good at it – equally annoyed and confused. Yuri laughed to himself at his constipated expression. 

On the other side of the rows of booths were two people, a young man and woman, who must have been related. They may have been twins even – equally tan skin and purple eyes made them stand out against the white wall behind them. They sat in silence but stared at each other intently, eating without losing their gaze on one another. The girl had her brows furrowed. 

The diner attracted a lot of weirdos because it was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Normal people came in all the time but so did the punks traveling into the city for shows they were already too high to enjoy, motorists who needed coffee at 3am, travelers with every possession in their backpacks, and old folk who walked in like they had the energy of kids in the middle of the day. Yuri had served them all with a smile and a wink so he could earn a good tip but never enjoyed serving sheriff after sheriff despite there not being a real police force in this part of the suburbs. He’s learned not to question it.

The girl in the booth with her brother stood up with a shout, drawing Yuri’s eyes back to them. 

“You’re being unreasonable, Mickey!” She yelled and dumped coffee on her brother, splashing it in his face and against the Formica table and the cracked vinyl of the booth seat without any provocation before stomping out, being chased by “Mickey” who looked terrified by the idea of her leaving. In the flash of them running out of the diner Yuri noticed they had matching scars, white and ragged, along their hairlines and cheeks – one on the woman’s right and the other on the man’s left like they had been peeled apart as kids and set to heal on their own. 

With a sigh Yuri heaved himself off of his barstool with the rag that was tucked under the counter and moved to clean up the spilled coffee and take the plates of food – distinctly unpaid for – back to the trash in the kitchen. People who dined and dashed put a huge dent in his wallet as the diner’s policy was to punish whoever let patrons go without paying even when it wasn’t their (his) fucking fault. The anger he had been trying to shed crept back up his neck. 

He was tired and sore from walking around in someone else’s body and leaving his own to sit around and do God knows what. Rubbing his eyes he dropped the rag into the laundry bin and sat back at the counter, bracing himself for another couple of hours. 

Yuri drowned himself in the smell of stale coffee and overdone eggs. If he had been smart he would have brought his sketchbook and drawn the man in the rainbow sweater, who looked angrier if possible, but Yuri wasn’t smart, he was impulsive. For all his anger at others he pissed himself off the most and if he was anything he was at least self-aware enough to recognize that. In his sketchbook’s stead he drew on napkin after napkin, trying to sort out the running thoughts in his head. 

He drew Mila’s smile, wolfish and smug and bleeding into the cheap paper of the napkin and paired it with her eyes, twinkling in the shitty light of the café. He gave her Dr. Nick’s shitty reading glasses for fun, hanging them low on her nose like a cranky librarian. Sophia’s fairy lights decorated the edge of the napkin and he filled in the negative space with shards of broken glass from the frame he dropped. Yuri tilted his head to the side, frowned, and crumpled up the mish-mash of a reminder of his day. 

As he doodled the hours ticked by, slowly but surely, because all things passed. His anger ebbed and flowed out of him. At some point he was just too tired to grumble at Mila and wish he still had her number so he could yell at her directly.

As the sky, visible through the picture windows in front of him, lightened from black to navy to lavender and burnt orange in the dawn Yuri’s eyes slipped shut while patrons trickled in. Katie, a little sixteen year old girl who had just started a few weeks ago and told Yuri he was cute on her first day, should be here soon. 

 _All things passed_ he reminded himself. _All things passed._ Katie passed, too, but she was passing by the counter with a stubborn pep in her step like she was trying to prove something to him so it didn’t really prove his point at all. She started the coffee maker while talking a mile a minute not that Yuri cared to process it at all. He slid from his stool like a piece of clothing, rumpled, and let his feet hit the floor hard before he picked up his bag from the back room and left, shoving through the glass front door into the cool morning air. 

His walk home was lit up by the faintest rays of sun, peaking out above the glittering silver towers of the city. Mikhail was still in his seat on the porch, up before the dawn to get ready for his shift at the hospital. The toy poodle was outside, its tired-looking owner waiting for it to finish peeing, and Ekaterina smiled down at Yuri from her window, just where he left her. 

Mom was asleep on the couch despite her bed being available in her room. Grandpa was snoring softly from his own and Yuri’s lamp was still on when he pressed through his door. He clicked it off but didn’t sleep, instead picking up his sketchbook.

Sleep tugged at the corners of Yuri’s eyelids as he flipped through his old book. Sometimes he would draw the people he visited or the strangers who came into Heaven’s Diner. Sometimes it was the skyline or a cool plant he saw. He hadn’t drawn properly in months, though, because the inspiration had left him – the best he could manage were little napkin doodles at 3am while he waited for the hours to slip by into the night. He felt a mixture of sour regret and sadness in his chest as he saw the date on the last thing he had tried to draw – his mom, sitting on the stoop of their apartment building, smoking a cigarette. She’d yelled at him half way through and he stopped. He closed the sketchbook with a sigh and dropped it on his bedside table before rolling over in his bed, exhausted.

He turned over onto his stomach, the way he normally slept, but his back hurt from being hunched at the counter of the diner so he flipped to his side and then his other side, unable to get comfortable. More often than not he tossed and turned before slipping into sleep these days. Mila’s smiling face loomed in his mind as he struggled to drift off. He counted to one-hundred and then backwards to one, he thought about what his plan for the next day was, he played music and turned it off, but it still took what felt like hours for him to slip into darkness.

 

* * *

 

 

The first thing he noticed was the smell of warm bread and the sound of a little girl laughing in his ear. When he opened his eyes he wasn’t in his room, he was sitting at a table with people he didn’t recognize. There was a woman with warm eyes staring at him, questioningly, and a man in a dark black suit eating without noticing any difference.

He’d never visited two days in a row. His breath caught in his throat like he missed a step coming down some stairs.

The girl next to him tugged at his sleeve and said something in a language he didn’t recognize. She looked at him expectantly, like he was supposed to answer her joke with a long practiced punchline but when he didn’t respond she frowned and turned away from him, pouting.  Yuri looked down at his hands and saw scars nicked into tan skin, stretched tight around fists he didn’t realize he was holding. He pushed away from the table with a scrape that hurt his own ears in the soft silence of the family breakfast he was interrupting.

Yuri walked as quickly and as nonchalantly as he could down the hallway away from the dining room. The bathroom door was wide open at the end of the hallway and he ducked inside before closing the door quietly, thanking whoever looked after him that it was this easy to find a place to hide.

The boy in the mirror was frowning at Yuri. His hair, shaved into an undercut, hung in his face like he hadn’t washed it in a while but his eyes were intense and piercing, showing none of the apprehension Yuri was feeling. The boy’s calming presence was pressing his usual anger and frustration flat and smooth as if it weren’t there at all. He felt exposed without it.

A flash out of the corner of his eye drew his attention away from the mirror but he couldn’t see anything when he turned his head. This was going to be awkward, exiting the bathroom and trying to find something important to smash while this boy’s family sat at their table, waiting for him to return from the bathroom so they could continue breakfast.

There was another flashing out of the corner of his eye but this time, when he turned, he saw a glow for just a second before it disappeared. As he stared at the spot where it had been the glow – a nearly transparent white light – appeared and flickered out, seeming to come out of a painting that was hung up on the wall. Yuri squinted. Was he hallucinating? What was he seeing? He didn’t have time to think about it before the glow appeared again, oozing out of the painting of a cat like leaking blood or a sighed breath and floated over towards Yuri. It burned hot and forced his arms wide like a magnet pushing against metal before fading through his shirt and into his chest.

The room went dark. Yuri’s alarm blared in his ear.


	3. Begin the Hunt

Yuri was thrown into darkness as the train dipped below the ground at Jefferson station. The sudden change in lighting made his bright phone shine painfully in his eyes and forced him to click it off lest he blind himself. The train shuttered to a stop in blackness and Yuri shuffled out into the lights of the station, crowded with noontime travelers that pressed into him as he walked up the stairs and through Jefferson, trying to get out of the piss-smell that always existed within five feet of a SEPTA logo.

The city glared around him, everything glittering and brick and loud in his head. Tucking his phone into his back pocket and lowering his sunglasses from the top of his head he stepped off down Broad, and then west on Arch, and then onto every side street he could as he made his way past Chinatown and Old City as he looked for the café Mila worked at. He had been too upset to take note of the address and only had a vague sense of where the location was.

Every alleyway offered Yuri all types of storefronts but none of them were the right one.

Sweat dripped down from Yuri’s hair, that he really did need to wash, and into his eyes. He squinted in the sun despite his sunglasses and stepped into a shadow so he could pull out his phone.

_From Mikhail, 12:37pm: u wanna smoke? I got some new stuff_

Yuri ignored the text from his friend and opened the internet app but was left blank when he realized he didn’t know what to search for. _Where does Mila Babicheva work_ probably wasn’t going to pull up too many results. He huffed and put his phone back into his back pocket, stepping into the sun again. He should have worn shorts or pulled out a fucking dress from where his were stuffed in the back of his closet for this, it was too goddamned hot.

Yuri pulled a cigarette from the crushed box in his pants and lit it, stomping down the street in one last attempt to find the stupid café.

There was a diner with a beaten up old door but that was wrong, and there was some kind of pop up shop that served nothing but poutine and that was definitely not it, and there were apartments with dripping air conditioning units humming in the summer air in between everything. Maybe Mila lived in one of them.

Skirting around a taped off section of the sidewalk that was being repaired Yuri walked back up the other side of the street. A building with a green door opened in front of him and a woman with half her hair shaved popped her head out.

Mila.

“I’ve been watching you go up and down this street for, like, half an hour. You looking for something?”

“Yeah, you, old hag. This isn’t where it was yesterday.” Yuri grumbled, waving his hands at the building.

“The Green Dragon is always on the move, kid. You just hafta look for the door.”

Mila ducked inside and Yuri followed, choosing to ignore the implication that this building would change locations on a semi-regular basis. The inside of the café was the same and just as cold as it had been the day before. The man with the black teeth was sitting in the same chair, too, and looked up at Yuri as he walked in and grinned at him.

“I told you to just call me, you know, it’s easier.” Mila said as she settled herself behind the counter on a stool remarkably similar to the one Yuri sat on at Heaven’s Diner. The black vinyl top was worn and it wobbled as Mila sat down as if one leg was shorter than the other three.

“Your fucking business card wasn’t too helpful when I woke up in my own body again. But I’m just here to ask you a question, alright?” Yuri said. He lifted his ponytail and draped it over his shoulder to free the back of his neck which was still slick with sweat.

“Hit me, kid.”

“You ever see some kind of floating light? That can disappear and reappear?” He leaned into Mila’s face, knowing he smelled like the cigarette he had dropped on the sidewalk, and tried to seem intimidating.

Mila smirked at him and leaned in to meet him, not frightened of his attitude in the least.

“Can’t say I have but I know someone who can probably help you better than me anyway. Since it’s so obvious you’re new to all of this.” Mila punctuated her response with a little laugh that made Yuri’s skin prickle with irritation.  

“Oh, go fuck yourself then. Excuse me for not fucking knowing anyone else who can do magic or whatever the fuck is going on.” Yuri was almost yelling at her, arms raised and spread wide. He didn’t care that some of the other patrons were watching him make a scene but he did care very much, that Mila didn’t so much as flinch at his temper. She could at least have the decency to act like she thought he was tough.

“First lesson, then, is that it’s not magic. Well, it’s not _just_ magic. It’s everything that you’ve ever heard about. Faeries and goblins and psychics and all that. We tend to stay out of the way, though, since it’s rough being out and proud in this world. There is a werewolf, though, over in the Czech Republic? He’s trying to get caught, I swear…” Yuri stopped listening once blood rushed into his face and head. The _woosh_ of air out of his lungs was loud and painful as Mila chattered on about everything he had for so long not been sure if he should believe in.

Yuri had always assumed here were others in the world like him. He just didn’t know to what extent. The man with the black teeth was watching him again.

“Oi, hag, come on, back to the subject at hand. The guy you think can help?”

“Right, right. His name is Viktor and he’s, like, a hypnotherapist or something. He meets all kinds of people so he probably knows something. He’s over near the Mütter because he’s dramatic and lives for the aesthetic of it all. I’ll get you his card. Oh, and, make sure you knock on his door, don’t just barge in. He’s always having sex with his husband in his office when he’s not expecting anyone.”

When Mila was done and had pressed Viktor’s business card into his hand and put her number in his phone Yuri turned on his heel to leave, ready to walk to the other side of the city.

“Oh, kid. You look better in this body by the way.” Mila called after him.

He scoffed, refusing to turn to look at her again.

 

* * *

 

 

As Yuri walked towards the Mütter Museum and Viktor’s office he began to get a distinct feeling of déjà vu. The closer he got the more familiar the city grew – he had been here yesterday. The image of the man with silver hair and a green UFO sign flashed in his brain.

 _Jesus Christ_ he thought to himself. He should have just come here in the first place instead of wandering around for half the day, getting dehydrated and sunburned, looking for the Green Dragon and Mila.

Viktor’s office was on the top floor of the building across the street from the Museum and Yuri had to buzz in to get the door unlocked. The security guard had her nose deep in a book titled _How to Use Healing Crystals_ and didn’t look up when Yuri walked past her and into an elevator that had probably looked good in the 80s – dark paneled wood was peeling a little at the corners and the gold of the button panel was tarnished from years of use. The elevator shook as it carried Yuri, wishing he had another cigarette, to the top of the building.

Yuri stepped out into the hallway he had been in yesterday.

Yuri nearly turned the knob on the door marked “Dr. Nikiforov” before he remembered Mila’s warning and rapt three times onto the thick wooden door. There was some scuffling and unintelligible words from inside the office before a man with black, messy hair and a rumpled shirt answered the door, squinting at Yuri like he was missing his glasses.

“Do you have an appointment?” The man asked. He had a slight accent but Yuri couldn’t place it.

“No, but I need to talk to Viktor. Now!” Yuri pushed past the other man into the office, making him stumble back a little.

The third man in the room, Viktor presumably, was sitting on the edge of his desk while he smoothed his shirt down. He looked a little pink around the edges and Yuri groaned internally at what he realized he had just interrupted.

“Oi, Viktor, you have to help me, okay?” Yuri was pointing at Viktor, trembling, feeling the day’s frustrations and confusions washing over him. He’s been stomping around the city for hours, he was sweaty, he was tired, and he was fucking bewildered about everything that had been going on around him in the last twenty-four hours. In all that time his neat little corner of Philadelphia, dirty in its own specific way, had been turned upside down and littered with new kinds of troubles.

“Oh?” Viktor responded, putting his finger up to his mouth. “And why’s that?”

“Because Mila said you would.”

“Ah, Mila, that girl always sends the strangest kids over to me. Have a seat.” Viktor pointed over to the couch that Yuri had woken up on yesterday. This was fucked up. Finally, though, he could read the notebook open on the desk beside the table and when he realized it was in Cyrillic he startled for a second.

_Patient presenting with unknown trauma – cannot remember how she got home yesterday. Possibly related to last year’s incident with King JJ._

Viktor snapped the notebook Yuri was peering into closed with a flick of his wrist and sat back down into the armchair. His top button was open and he wasn’t fixing it even though Yuri could see a little red mark on his throat. The other man moved to sit behind Viktor’s desk and opened up a laptop, looking disinterested. Yuri suspected this was in violation of his supernatural doctor-patient confidentiality rules but he was too keyed up to really give that much of a shit about the legality of psychic therapy or whatever anyway.

“What’s going on?” Viktor prompted, sounding patient and practiced, with his hands clasped in his lap, legs crossed.

“It – I – fucking, okay so sometimes I wake up as other people which is annoying or whatever but not the point – this morning I woke up as this guy. And there was this kind of floaty glow thing and it went into his body and then I was myself again and I don’t know what the fuck it was but I’ve walked all over the city to find you so you better fucking know what it was.” Yuri was almost panting from speaking so fast.

“What’s your name?” Viktor asked, ignoring everything Yuri had just spewed.

“Yuri. Can we get back – “

“Oh, how cute! Yuri, meet Yuuri! He’s my husband.” Viktor said, turning with a huge smile plastered on his face to point to the other man who turned pink across his cheeks.

“You need to focus, Vitya.” Yuuri said without looking away from his laptop, sounding exasperated despite the blush.

“Right. So. You wake up as other people? That’s quite interesting, I’ve never seen that before.”

Yuri got up from the couch, unable to sit still despite being tired and sore from walking all over the goddamned city. He knew he probably stunk like sweat and cigarettes and city air but he didn’t care all that much and walked around the office, nervous energy pushing him to walk along the bookshelves lining the room. The books were in all different languages but the ones in English and Russian held a common theme – _Hypnotherapy for Children, Awakening old Memories, Speaking to Traumatized Fae, Navigating the Seelie Court_. It was all magic shit. 

“Yeah. I’ll be in the middle of doing something or I’ll be asleep and then, _bam_ , I’m in China or Jamaica or just down the street. But that’s not why I’m here.” Yuri turned away from the bookshelves and looked at Viktor square in his blue eyes. “This thing, I need to know what it was and why it pushed me out of that guy’s body.”

Viktor put his finger up to his mouth again like he was mulling it over. Yuri noticed that he was wearing lip gloss. He got up from his chair with a smooth grace and began to flick through various books on the shelves before pulling out a huge black-covered tome from the bottom shelf. It had silver filigree along the spine and on the front cover.

 _An Introduction to Spirits and the Underworld_ read the looping English script. Viktor flipped through the pages with his long, slender fingers which did nothing but kick dust up into the air. He beckoned Yuri closer and pointed at what looked like a printed version of a charcoal drawing, the image showing a figure with its arms wide and a glowing circle in the center of the figure’s chest.

“A bit like this?” Viktor asked, pressing close to Yuri’s side. He smelled like cologne and cloves and candle smoke.

“Yeah. What the fuck is it?”

Viktor snapped the book closed and pushed it back into its spot on the bottom shelf, answering without needing to read.

“An orb is essentially a ghost. Some bit of energy that’s left behind and attached to an object, usually owned by the person who died. They can be known to float freely though. What’s interesting is that not everyone can see them – do you usually see ghosts, Yurio?”

“No. And that’s not my fucking name.”

“It’ll be too confusing, you see, having two Yuris. But this means the boy you visited with can see ghosts. It also means he may be in the middle of a possession…” Viktor trailed off and he walked over to another bookshelf, pulling volumes seemingly at random, while humming to himself. As he moved Yuri was reminded, vaguely, of his old dance instructor. Viktor was tall, just a few inches taller than Yuri himself, but moved with an incredible ease that was more befitting of an athlete than a stuffy therapist with a library’s worth of books in his office and likely in his home and a nerdy-looking husband.

Yuuri was tapping away at his computer while Yuri waffled around in the office. He was still feeling hot lava anger in his stomach but the cold air of the room he was in had cooled it considerably, tempering him down despite his confusion, and Viktor looked like he was in the middle of solving world hunger with the way his eyes flit past the words in front of him so Yuri wasn’t about to interrupt him, not when he was getting answers handed to him without doing any of the work himself.

“I know he’s a lot but he’s going to help you out.” Yuuri said softly as Yuri wandered close to him.

Yuri made a noncommittal _hmmph_ sound but otherwise didn’t respond to the statement directly.

“So, like, what’s your deal? You a therapist like him?” Yuri asked instead, trying to fill the silence. He’d never liked quiet rooms where there were people to talk to, not because he liked people inherently, but because silence made him uncomfortable.

Yuuri laughed quietly and smiled over at Yuri who was leaning against the desk, trying to look casual.

“I’m a dancer, actually. But you’ll usually see me around.” Yuuri looked like there was more he wanted to say on the subject but he blushed, instead, and turned back to his laptop.  

“I think I’ve got something!” Viktor called from the other side of the room, speaking for the first time in a while. Yuri turned to look at Viktor, silently thankful for the interruption. He got up from the floor where he was surrounded by books, all open to different pages with sticky notes and bookmarks in them, looking a bit like a college student cramming for an exam. When he stood, notebook in hand, he grunted ever so slightly and put a hand to his lower back.

“I’ve got a few ideas my Yuris. You see, Celestino writes that people who can see spirits are often resistant to possessions so it’s possible the guy you visited with is okay, but since you were controlling his body it’s also possible that you’re the reason he’s possessed, if he is.”

“Vitya, you’re implying he’s in danger.” Yuuri said from over the top of his laptop, looking at his husband through his thick glasses.

“I suppose I am. Possessions can be frightening at best and deadly at worst. It’s hard to say.”

“We should pay our favorite psychic a visit then, yes?”

“Ah, Yuuri, you’re so smart!” Viktor threw his arms wide, nearly hitting Yuri in the face, as he walked behind the desk and wrapped Yuuri up in a tight and over-affectionate hug.

 

* * *

 

 

Viktor drove a hot pink convertible. Yuri sat in the back of that convertible and reexamined his life while Yuuri and Viktor sat in the front seats and fiddled with the radio every five seconds, not being able to agree on what to listen to. The car ride was only a few minutes long, as they were staying in the city, so the changing music and whipping wind did nothing for Yuri but drive an already steady headache into throbbing-migraine territory.

As they headed southeast Yuri could smell the stagnant, dirty water of the Delaware River that separated Philly from New Jersey. They drove closer and closer, down the stop-and-go traffic of South Street until they were nearly in the river themselves. The apartments that littered the riverbank were bigger and more expensive than almost anything else in the city, let alone anything in Yuri’s corner of suburbia. They all had huge windows and roof decks and every household had a dog and a baby and a steady job. Yuri hated this part of Philly. It was all a front, he thought, hiding every horrible human thing behind new brick and steel condos.

As Viktor drove around block after block looking for some place to park his obnoxious car Yuri rubbed at his temples. All he had wanted to do was figure out what the floating light he had seen was and now he was stuck in a please-rob-me type of car, driving to see someone who claimed to be a psychic with a hypnotherapist and his dancer husband. If Yuri had been smart he would have said yes to smoking with Mikhail and left the city after he couldn’t find Mila’s shop.

“Alright, my Yuris, I think this is going to be as good as it gets.” Viktor said, backing up the boat of a car into a parking spot along a side street.

Yuri hopped out of the car without opening the door and watched as Viktor jogged around the front to open the door for Yuuri, grinning all the way. As Yuuri got out Viktor pointed to the tree they had parked under, heavy with flowers and leaves and a heavy floral smell like it was the beginning of spring and not the middle of a hot and dry June. The little branches of the tree shook in the breeze and pink petals fluttered down from the tree, caught in the air.

“Look, when we get back our car will be full of flowers. How romantic!” Viktor was trying his best to murmur into Yuuri’s ear but he was walking too fast, embarrassed, so Viktor ended up chasing after him looking a bit like a lost puppy. Yuri turned almost as pink as Yuuri did at Viktor’s actions.

“We only have a couple days left, my Yuuri, I want to make them special!” Viktor called after Yuuri, who was walking even faster.

“Viktor!” Yuuri yelled over his shoulder, borscht-red.

The three of them hurried down the sidewalk in the afternoon sun. Yuri lagged behind, not knowing where they were headed. Kids scurried around them and happy-looking parents pushed strollers with squirming babies and little dogs on leashes while they walked hand-in-hand. The river flowed by on Yuri’s right and it all looked so picturesque that his stomach flipped around inside of him. Grandpa said jealousy was a sin but it was so easy to hate people who lived down here.

Yuuri and Viktor, walking hand-in-hand just like the couples that lived here turned up a set of steps of one of the nice apartments. The sign on the door, a black and gold metal plate hung up against the red painted wood had nothing on it but an image of an open eye, similar to what was on Mila’s card. Viktor and Yuuri pushed through the door without knocking.

The room inside the apartment building – or, rather, the entryway to what must have been a house – was as red as the door they had just walked through. The walls were crimson and hung with dozens of photos, scarves, tapestries, and ornate masks. There were candelabras and menorahs in the window sills next to potted plants, rosemary and cacti, and incense holders. There was a round table in the center of the room with a white, gauzy cloth thrown over it. Yuri could see spots of melted wax and charcoal spots on it from where he stood in the doorway. A woman, straight as a board, sat at the table.

Her hair was pulled tight against her scalp into a perfect ballerina bun. Small pearls sat in her earlobes, her makeup was heavy and sticking in her wrinkled skin and her eyes were closed as she mouthed out silent words. Her hands, each finger weighed down with a heavy gold ring set with various jewels, were outstretched at the table and she was wearing a long, flowing red robe that matched the walls. It was decorated with flowers and vines and hung loose on her tiny frame.

Viktor and Yuuri stood still, watching her, waiting for her to finish whatever she was doing. Yuri wanted to cough at the heavy incense smell clouding the room, dim with the light of only the windows, but he held it for fear of interrupting whatever was happening. His lungs burned as he refused to choke.

“Yuri Plisetsky.” She said, loudly and confidently, without opening her eyes. “The first thing you need to learn is that to succeed you must learn control. Control is beautiful. Beauty is the crushing force of righteousness.”


	4. Fuck Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuri gets into a little bit of trouble.

“Don’t worry, she does that to everyone.” Yuuri whispered in his ear, not that it really helped the surprise that left Yuri’s brows furrowed and mouth parted.

The woman flipped her hands so they were palm down on the table, resting atop the lace cloth, and stared at the three of them as they hung awkwardly in the entryway.

“Lilia, we want to ask you some questions. May we sit?” Viktor said. He flipped his hair out of his face like he thought he was hot shit even though he was dressed like a complete dweeb – tan suit jacket and khakis cuffed at the ankles of all things.

“When have I ever been able to stop you, Nikiforov?”  Her tone was resigned and she looked defeated already.  Yuri was inclined to ask about their relationship but he held his tongue against the roof of his mouth lest he embarrass himself.

Viktor led the three of them out of the doorway, grabbed a chair from the far wall and plopped it on the other side of the table with Yuuri to his right and Yuri on his left. Yuuri looked awkward and uncomfortable and he curled his hands into the white cloth while Viktor began to speak again.

“Yurio, here,” He nodded to Yuri, shaking his silver hair into his eyes, “Has found himself in a bit of a predicament. He’s gifted, he can visit other’s bodies with his mind and it’s actually quite fascinating and I want – er - he was mid-visit with someone yesterday who we think may have been possessed. That’s more you area of expertise so we wanted to ask your advice.”

Viktor got excited as he spoke and his eyes shone like a kid’s on Christmas while he explained the situation, tripping over his own words.

Lilia, on the other hand, stayed impassive as ever and turned her dark green eyes to Yuri’s light ones. She squinted down at him with the sharpest gaze he had ever experienced. It made him squirm in his unpadded seat, feeling as if he was being broken down into tiny pieces as she examined him. She stood, robe flowing around her like red fog, and glided around the table to level her face at his. He refused to pull back even though his heart was pounding and every fiber of his being was telling him to do so – he met her stare with his own defiant one, hoping she got the hint.

“Child, I can’t help you if you do not learn to control yourself.” Lilia turned on her heal and floated back down in her own seat. She dismissed him easily.

Yuri finally snapped under the subtle implication of her words and the weight of the day’s events. He knew he was proving her right with his flash bang temper but he didn’t really care as acid rose in his throat along with his words, falling out of his mouth before he had the chance to stop them.

“I never said anything about finding him again. All I fucking wanted this morning was to find out what the light that threw me out of his body was. That’s fucking _it_. These two are the ones that brought me here, I didn’t ask for this.” Yuri said, shoving his finger at Viktor who did nothing but smile demurely over at him.

“What is it that you want, then?” She lowered her gaze to him again and looked like one of those nuns in a movie version of a Catholic school – high expectations and low patience, hard eyes and harder mouth.

“I want to go to work! I want to take a goddamned nap.” Yuri rubbed his fingers into his eyes, trying to shed some of the bleariness that had begun to settle in them because of the ash in the air from the burning incense – roses, cloves, and old perfume mingled together until his eyes stung with the stench of it all.

“You have a great power in you if you would simply learn to use it.” Lilia shrugged as she spoke, easily dismissive again. Her Russian accent was thick on her tongue like she had only just learned to speak English and Yuri was tempted to shout at her if he didn’t know Viktor (and likely Yuuri) would also be able to understand. With fists balled he stood up, knocking the chair over with a loud crash, wood against wood, and simply shouted over the noise in the otherwise quiet room.

“Listen, I don’t know what the fuck this all is. I don’t care if you’re some real goddamned psychic or if you can read my mind but all I fucking wanted was to know what the light was. I found out. I don’t want to hear about having real power and I don’t want to be driven around the fucking city any more. I have to go to work in, like, two hours. I’m leaving.”

Yuri stomped out of the house with Viktor and Yuuri staring after him, though Lilia seemed nonplussed by the outburst. Outside in the slowly fading light Yuri gulped in breath after breath of clean air and tried to let it settle into his lungs with great a great failure to actually do so and began to walk down the street towards Broad. It would take forever to get home at this rate but there was no way in hell he was going to wait around for Viktor and Yuuri.

He passed the street where the pink monstrosity was parked without a second glance.

 

* * *

 

 

The train was unforgivably bright. It rattled down the tracks northward and the seat Yuri was sitting in was stained. He closed his eyes for what felt like the first time all day and waited for his station to be called, yawning in the cold air of the car.

He almost missed his stop.

 

* * *

 

 

Yuri’s sketchbook was open in front of him on the diner counter. There was a grease stain on the upper right hand corner from a dropped french fry and it pissed him off enough to think about ripping the page out.

The twins from last night were back and staring at each other in the same way – never breaking eye contact but occasionally interrupting the low hum of the air conditioning with a blurted non sequitur. Their conversation made no sense.

“Mickey, please.”

“Sara that’s not true and you know it.”

“Mom gave me lunch so it wasn’t a big deal.”

Yuri tried to ignore their voices but they were sitting right in front him in in the booth next to the glass front door that he was supposed to have cleaned a week ago and he heard every word even though they only opened their mouths every so often and with no discernable pattern. The way they looked at each other was distressing – it was like they were having a conversation in nothing but furrowed brows and borrowed looks, like they knew what the other one wanted without needing to reach out and ask for it. It was nearly intimate.

Yuri looked down at the blank page in his book, again, trying to ignore the weirdo twins but the pages were moving in front of him like light on water. He wanted a cigarette and a good, long sleep. The night ticked by and yeah, all things passed, but the sky wasn’t lightening to dawn colors quite yet so it didn’t really feel like he was making much progress in passing the time.

Sighing into the still air of the empty diner he began his usual warm up – draw a basic outline of a face or a figure and hope the rest of the details would fill themselves in. Drawing was a fucking struggle, especially now. Every line seemed shaky and wrong like he had regressed back to the Yuri who sat for his first real art lesson in his freshman year of high school, alone and in the back of the classroom. Every year that class had been one of his few A’s and his teacher wanted him to apply to school but he didn’t have the energy to even show up as a senior, let alone put in an expensive application to Tyler or U Arts.

The face in his sketchbook was frowning because Yuri was frowning, too. It was probably his own mouth, even – a nearly straight line with his lips pulled tight and deep creases in his cheeks. Mikhail had a real frown, a neat and tidy upside-down U that made Yuri laugh because it was so comically perfect even though he only ever saw it when Mikhail was really, genuinely upset. Grandpa didn’t frown because he was too nice and mom likely didn’t know how to smile much anymore but she didn’t frown, either, because she generally went straight into yelling, zero to one hundred. This mouth was none of theirs.

In place of eyes he drew the damn orb that had ruined his day. He felt bad about exploding at Lilia’s but he figured he was justified – hanging out with a bunch of mystic hocus pocus strangers trying to tell him he was special just wasn’t quite his deal. And he was tired, anyway.

Yuri drew some melted, amorphous candles in the bottom corner, not really attached to anything.

If Lilia truly thought he was special she probably would have forced him to stay, anyway. There was no way she was a real psychic – it was all too cliché, the candles and the incense and the ugly red room was straight out of a B-list film. A woman that severe would never dress herself that way if it weren’t for show and if it were for show it was fake. That’s just the way it was.

Yuri took another fry off of his plate. They were cold and mushy by now, a few hours of his shift in, but he was still hungry and didn’t have the money to order anything else because rent was due in a couple days.

A stack of off-kilter Tarot cards made their way into Yuri’s sketch as he thought about the way Lilia had stared him down like a bull fighter. She was dressed for it, all in red, like she wanted to fight. There was something wrong about that woman – she was too intense to be a hippie psychic. She would have made a good professor of the sciences – all needlepoint intellect and no art despite her dancer’s bun.

Powerful, huh? He didn’t feel fucking powerful scraping for tips at midnight, eating food that was going to kill him, and losing his damn mind by becoming other people. If cigarettes didn’t kill him waking up in the wrong body one day surely would. He knew it was coming, too, waking up as someone getting into a fight or doing something stupid and dangerous – it was only a matter of time.

Yuri moved back to the face and gave him - yeah, it was him, who was he kidding - his undercut. It looked douchey. His hair hung in front of his face, mostly covered by a negative-space-glow-orb, and his jaw was tight. The cat from the painting the orb came out of hung behind him, giving him little pointed ears on the top of his head. It would have been cute if it weren’t all so fucking dumb. He had no real connection to this boy and he had no responsibility towards him even if he was possessed.  His family could call a priest like all good religious folk do, and he knew they were religious from the way they ate breakfast together. Only nice, good, God-fearing people do that – eat like a family, especially out in the suburbs somewhere which is where he almost certainly had been based on the size of the house.

Yuri put his pen down and rubbed at his eyes again. They really fucking hurt. He pictured the boy in his mind – his tan skin had been a little sweaty in the mirror but maybe that was Yuri’s fault. He had felt calm even though his face was scowling. Yuri wondered about the little scars on his hands and where they had come from. If this boy could see ghosts maybe that’s why he had been so unmoved by the glow that came from the painting in the bathroom; maybe he had seen it before. A tiny spark of jealousy flared in Yuri because he had never felt that calm before, he was always too worked up about something. Half the time he woke up with music already in his head and three trains of thought barreling through his brain before he had breakfast – he thought maybe he had ADHD or something because everything around him was so much all of the time. It wouldn’t matter though, he couldn’t afford to do anything about it.

The twins paid for their meal (this time) and left an alright tip that Yuri pocketed.

There were a few other people in the booths around him and one man sitting at a stool at the counter but all else was quiet in the diner. He had one earphone in but he didn’t know what was playing from his phone anymore, it was all youtube autoplay because he was always trying to find something new to listen to but rarely succeeding. The soft music lulled him into the dark gray of almost-sleep, head leaning against his hand on the counter.

His current exhaustion softened the edges of his frustration like it usually did. Sometimes when nights were bad he would stay awake just to calm down because if he went to bed angry he woke up angry and he was tired of people saying that he reminded them of his mom.

His vision blurred at the edges and he couldn’t focus on his drawing anymore, or the patrons in the diner, or the counter or the floor or the sound of his music.

As his eyes slipped shut he heard a buzz in his ear that he couldn’t shake. The diner was dark like night, now, too and the noise just got louder and louder until it was a roar in his face and there was wind whipping at his back. The road in front of him was moving too fast and he didn’t know how to drive and what was this, oh God –

_oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god_

Yuri didn’t know how to drive a motorcycle but the fear in him wasn’t just his, it was the other boy’s too, and they were going too fast for him to steer but the other boy couldn’t either because he was terrified and not in control of his own body anymore and _oh god_. The bike shook underneath him. He didn’t know where the brake was. The road was too dark to see anything in front of him despite the headlight – the only thing coming through the blackness was the dotted white lines painted on the pavement and the flash of the occasional house coming through the forest.

The road curved up ahead.

Yuri braced the other boy’s body as they crashed the bike headfirst into the guard, feeling pain for a flash inside the sound of crumpling metal.

Yuri’s heart raced as he jolted awake at the counter of the diner, hand slipping and pushing his fries to the ground with a clatter. The people in the booths turned to look at him and he burned red under their stares, looking down at the mess he made. Yuri picked his food up with shaking hands – was that a dream? If he just visited the boy and killed him was he responsible? Should he go and find him? His mind was already racing with every single possible scenario.

Yuri squeezed his eyes shut and tried to reach out to the boy – he tried to make his vision blurry again and he tried to smell the forest from the wrecked bike but all he got was dish cleaner and hot sausage. He tried again, breathing deeply to calm himself. Lilia said he was fucking powerful or whatever and she better be right. His undercut. His frown. The little scars on his hands –

_His face felt wet and he was blinking something out of his eyes._

Yuri breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. His hair, the way it fell on his forehead and the feeling of peace and quiet –

_A flicker of light from the headlight._

Yuri forced his brain into the other boy’s mind. He pushed his hands into his eyes so it was as dark as the night in the forest –

_A sharp pain in the back of his head. His eyes slipped closed again._

Yuri opened his eyes and looked around himself – he was small and alone and trapped in the bright white light of the diner while the other boy lay in some ditch, bleeding, and just as alone.

_A blurry light of a cell phone. They’d been driving on the right side of the road which meant they were probably in the US which meant he could figure out 9-1-1 even though he couldn’t actually read the little numbers in the app._

It was the best Yuri could do for now. His heart kept jumping in his chest to the beat of the music in his ear _We've been running out here for a long time / Let's just make the most of what's left tonight / Can you bring your body closer to mine / It's all out of love_ until he ripped his headphones out and was thrown into the silence of the diner again. No one was looking at him this time but he was nearly panting in his stool. Everything was so mixed up and his head hurt and what the fuck was he supposed to do? He got the boy his phone and he called 911 and grunted into the line as best he could with the sharp pain in his, well, his everything but that boy had been horrified of something before the crash had even happened.

Yuri pulled out his phone and dialed Mila, thankful she had put it in his phone earlier in the day. Her phone rang three times before a robot picked up. _You’ve reached a Ouija number. Please try again using the appropriate device._

Fuck. Stupid fucking hag.

Yuri paced up and down the area behind the counter, stomping his boots on the tile even though he knew he was annoying everyone trying to eat a nice 1am dinner. He counted to one hundred. He counted backwards to one. He took a deep breath and –

Nothing.

He tried again, counting to two hundred and backwards to one. His breathed in the smell of pancakes and reached out for the feeling of almost sleep because that’s what had worked before. Still, just blackness. He stilled and took a huge breath before letting it out feeling stupid. He knew he looked like he was crazy or something and that there were probably people watching him try and stop himself from having a panic attack but he just needed one more hint, one more glimpse. He fucking _willed_ his heart to slow.

_Red and blue lights. Still pain, but a little clearer. A face above him._

From the outside it would be hard to see that anything was wrong, the scene being thus: cold blue light radiating outwards from a diner with pale green seats that matched the eyes of a little blond boy standing at the counter. The diner, all shiny metal and glass, radiated light from the inside and the flickering neon glow of _Heaven’s Diner_ above the door. It was a bright spot against the dark sky, the deep forest, and the oil-coated pavement of the parking lot. If you looked closely you would see the tremble of fear in the boy’s body as he was dwarfed by everything around him.

Yuri’s shoulders dropped. Okay, okay, okay. All things passed, right?

 

* * *

 

 

Yuri’s sleep was dreamless and deep – his exhaustion paying off. He had sunk into bed regretfully – he wanted go and find that boy, somehow, even though he didn’t know if he lived in the same state, let alone the same city but instead he went home and felt a little like a coward until sleep forced his brain to shut down. He turned his alarm off in his sleep and rose when the sun was already high in the sky. He felt both tired and rested as he woke with the feeling of unease already settling into his stomach. He was too nauseous for breakfast so he had a cigarette, instead, out on the stoop of the fire escape.

As he sat in the sun with nothing but a thin white cotton dress between him and the heat he pictured the boy’s face over and over in his head like the rhythm to a club beat – steady, strong, and unwavering. He figured he should find him and apologize, sorry I almost killed you by accidentally possessing you, but there was something else, too.

The boy had been scared. Beyond scared – completely horrified and he was running from something, whatever had terrified him, on that bike. Yuri could feel the way the boy’s adrenaline was spiked around his own and he knew, deep in his gut, that the boy needed help.

Yuri flicked ash from the end of his cigarette.

Time to go crawling back to Lilia.

He stomped his way to the train, still wearing the dress and his combat boots, and then he stomped all the way down to Front Street and he stomped up to Lilia’s door, stared the eye down with all his might, and pushed through into the red room without knocking.

Just like yesterday the room was filled with smoke even though the windows were open, pale curtains fluttering in the breeze in front of all of the things cluttered on the window sills. The chairs they had used were still at the table which now had a stack of cards sitting on top of it.

“Oi, Lilia!” He called into the room when he realized she wasn’t there.

A bird outside the window cawed.

“Lilia! I need to talk to you!” He yelled again.

Nothing but wind chimes.

“You hag, come the fuck on!”

“Yuri Plisetsky, please don’t use unattractive words.”

Lilia was standing _behind him_ of all places on the steps to her home. She was dressed in gauzy white and looked like mist rolling in over the Delaware, plastic shopping bag in her bejeweled hand. She moved past him, twisting gracefully around where he stood in the door and beckoned him to follow and sit at the table. This time Yuri took Viktor’s seat and sat across from her while she pulled out packages of gems and stones from her shopping bag. She sorted them not by color or size but by something else that Yuri couldn’t figure out. Neat piles of glittering, colorful rocks sat in front of him as he tried to figure out exactly what he wanted to say. His carefully planned words had gone out of his mind once Lilia scared the shit out of him on the steps to her home.

“Why are you back?” She sounded terse.

Yuri pictured the face of the other boy, again, and recoiled from himself at the memory of blood trickling into his eyes last night.

“I need you to train me. Like you said you would.”

Lilia’s eyes flicked up and a ghost of a smile touched her face.

“Excellent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we go~


	5. Missed Connections

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lesson, a tour, and some missed points.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this update took forever. It's a long chapter, though, so hopefully it's worth it. 
> 
> Philadelphia is an awful, awesome, wonderful, garbage town so I was happy I had a good excuse to do a tiny, tiny tour of it in this chapter. We will continue to see some of the neat places around town in future chapters.

Lilia’s white cloud dress moved around her as she continued to sort the stones in between them. Her bony hands were once again adorned with glittering rings and white, pearly nail polish that matched her dress, the white lace tablecloth, and Yuri’s own thin maxi. They were a pale splotch in the scarlet room, sitting still and silent for a beat before Lilia opened her mouth.

“Why have you changed your mind?” Her tone was pointed, much like everything else about her.

“I got that ghost boy into trouble last night and I think Viktor was right – I think he’s in danger.” Yuri rushed his words. He’d felt breathless all morning as he thought about the boy on the motorcycle, wondering if he really was going to be alright. He’d tried to reach out like he had in the diner but couldn’t get anywhere, much to his own frustration.

“A battle on two fronts, then. And get used to it, child, Viktor is often right about a lot of things as much as it frustrates us. Makes him good inside what he does and insufferable outside of it. Now, tell me, you have no control over your gift, correct?”

Yuri shifted in his seat, feeling like he was about to be scolded by a schoolteacher for not turning in his homework.

 “Not really. Last night, though, I kind of did it on purpose. It was the only time I’ve ever done it though. Why are you asking, anyway? You knew my name already so shouldn’t you know all of this shit?”

“Your name was obvious; you radiate your personality. Anyone with even the smallest amount of clairvoyance would be able to tell. Listen, child, you came to me for help and I’m going to give it to you if you learn to follow the rules. You understand?” Lilia was leaning over the table now, nearly reaching into Yuri’s space.

“I guess.”

“So answer my questions. When do you most often find yourself as other people?”

Yuri stopped for a moment before answering, thinking with his brow furrowed.

“When I sleep, I guess. Or when I’m drawing.”

Lilia leaned back into her chair again, opening up the table between them. Her face was hard to read but there was a tiny smile on her lips, still, and her eyes were sharp on Yuri’s skin like needles, making him feel poked and prodded. She got up without a word and went to the desk that was shoved in the back of the room and pulled out a black cardboard box before coming back to the table. The black box was faded and beat up against the delicate lace tablecloth.

From the box Lilia produced a wooded board with letters and numbers painted onto it. She pulled out a heart-shaped planchette, too, printed with the word _Ouija_.

“I’m glad you’re beginning to look beyond your own nose, child.” Lilia said as she laid out the board in front of them.

“You sound like this girl I know.” Yuri hummed as he watched Lilia’s thin fingers and crinkled skin work the planchette back and forth across the row of numbers, lingering on certain ones.

“Mila sounds like me, child, as she should. I trained her, too.”

 

* * *

 

 

Yuri felt very stupid. Very, very stupid and very, very watched as he sat at the table and closed his eyes and tried to meditate on the feeling of _calm_. This was fucking dumb and continued to prove that Lilia was a fake psychic that had somehow tricked real people into thinking she had a gift because meditation was fucking useless and he didn’t feel calm at all.

Lilia said his first lesson was _control_ and that he needed to feel calm to be in control because the fact that he visited most often in his sleep meant peace was the key but he was turning red under Lilia’s stare. He’d been sitting here for what felt like ages as they waited for Mila to show up.

“You’ll be able to practice with her easier, since she won’t lose herself like others will.”

Yeah, well, alright but what the fuck was he doing in the meantime?

“Reel in that frustration, Yuri, you’re spilling it all over my room.”

Yuri cracked his eyes at that and scowled as he watched Lilia start to shuffle the Tarot cards that were in her hands. _Swish-swish_ they went as she moved them from right to left and back again.

“Think about how you feel when you’re drawing or when you’re near the person you love the most. At peace.” _Swish-swish._

Yuri had only drawn out of frustration lately and he missed his Grandpa as he’d been so busy with work he hadn’t been able to go downstairs to the shop so both of those suggestions fucking sucked. Instead, he closed his eyes and remembered the pull of a cigarette when he’d been craving one and it worked, for a little.

He breathed in deeply and listened to the _swish-swish_ of Lilia’s cards and tried to focus on the taste of ash on his tongue. He still felt dumb, so incredibly dumb with his hands balled into fists and pushed into his lap in the hard-backed chair but he tried his best to push that aside and focus on _calm_. He almost felt like he was getting somewhere.

_swish-swish-swish_

_swish-swish_

_crash-bang-boom_

The door to Lilia’s swung open.

“Oi, Lilia, you’re lucky I was free today and that I love you because coming down here is a chore.”

Mila’s voice was high and shrill and made Yuri crush his eyes closed as he tried to hold onto the feeling of calm before Mila’s big-sister antics forced him to let it go.

“Oh, he’s a princess today! Gonna get into my head Yuri?”

And, well, there it went. Yuri’s hands tensed in his dress as he snapped his eyes open to glare at Mila. She was standing above him, all attitude and swaying red hair and a shit-eating grin. She managed to be loud even when her mouth was closed and Yuri could practically hear the way she was laughing at him in his head.

“Mila, stop it. You’ve ruined his concentration.” Lilia’s tone was cool, like she was trying to protect Yuri’s feelings which only served to irritate him more. As much as he didn’t like being made fun of he didn’t like being pitied either.

Mila sat down without another word, turning her chair around so she could rest her hands on the back of it like some kind of high school delinquent.

“You two called me out of bed. This is what you get. There’s no way he’s gonna be ready any time soon though, anyone with a tiny bit of clairvoyance would be able to sense what he’s pushing out. Fuck, even Viktor would be able to tell.”

Yuri, desperate to remain calm in the name of a boy he didn’t know the name of attempted to let the comment roll off his back. It didn’t work all that well but at least he could say that he tried.

“You’re a goddamned hag, you know that. It’s your business card that says _call for help_.” Yuri could hear the venom in his voice. It came up from his stomach and burned his throat as he spoke to her, wanting to yell at her, wanting to wipe the stupid spider smile off her face.

“Never said it was nice help. I’m honest, after all, comes with the territory.” She grinned wider and Yuri’s acid turned to lava.

“Don’t be a fucking bitch.” He spat at her.

Lilia stood at that and rounded the table to stand between them. She was showing the most amount of emotion Yuri had yet to see but he still couldn’t read her. Brows slightly furrowed, mouth a tiny frown, she put he hands on both of their shoulders and frightened Yuri down to the core with a glare that was as cold as ice.

“Never speak like this again. You understand?”

“I guess.” Yuri paled under her grip, tight as a vice, as he answered.

Their lesson continued, after that, albeit in a much tenser atmosphere. Yuri was set to calm down – a difficult feat while Mila’s eyes bored holes into his skull. He felt like he was being trephined under her blue eyes but instead of blood and brain leaking out it was all his frustration and anger and general piss-off attitude. He poured and poured and poured it all out into the room until even he could feel his emotions clog the air like the smoke from Lilia’s incense burner in the window.

Yuri couldn’t grasp the feeling of calm or control after Mila burst through the door. He felt her eyes roll around him like she was over it and over him and over the boy that needed help.

Lilia continued to _swish-swish_ her cards as he sat in front of her; she was waiting for him to stop radiating anger but Yuri was sure that moment wasn’t going to come. Not today, at least. She must have understood that too because she tried to help him along, voice whispery in the quiet room like dry ice.

“Focus on something that makes you happy. Something that slows your heart down and, holding that in your mind, reach out to Mila. Understand?”

Yuri nodded but wasn’t feeling all that hopeful. He reached around into his brain, trying to push the lingering anger and frustration out of the way, and looked for something that made him feel calm. Focusing on feeding his nicotine addiction had worked a little before so maybe, he reasoned, it would work again. Certainly something real like that would work better than something flowery and dumb like the setting sun over a beach or whatever crap Lilia was sure to suggest.  

As he breathed in Lilia’s smoky air he thought about the first drag of a cigarette, something he could really go for right now even though the air outside was hot and thick like soup, and he pictured Mila in his head, too.  

Acrid cigarette breath and Mila’s red hair.

The way a new pack felt in his jean pockets and her big, toothy smile.

Yuri furrowed his brows and willed himself to leak into her brain the way he had forced himself into the boy’s mind but felt nothing but a wall up around her. Or, maybe, the wall was built around him. He breathed in through his nose and tried to still his heart but couldn’t get past his own skull.

“This was fucking easier with him.” He muttered under his breath as he tried again to reach out to Mila.

“If he’s sensitive to spirits he may have been more open to your presence. It’s hard to guess.” Lilia responded to him, equally quiet. She continued to swish her cards back and forth, creating a drone of repetitive sound that bounced around in Yuri’s mind. She was probably doing it on purpose.

With a deep breath Yuri tried to relax again even though his brow demanded creasing and his fists wouldn’t unclench but still he tried to push past his own head and into Mila’s one more time.

“You look like you’re constipated.”

Yuri opened his eyes, blinking in the light.

“Alright well fuck you too, then. I’m fucking trying.”

Yuri slouched back in his chair, feeling defeated. He rubbed at his temples and could feel a headache coming on – whether it was from the heat, his craving for a cigarette, or all of the mental energy he was burning through was anyone’s guess. He glared over at Mila who glared right back and he looked at Lilia, seemingly displeased but honestly too hard to read for Yuri to be sure.

“I’m taking a break.” Yuri announced, getting up and moving to the door. He pushed through into the hot white light of a cloudy summer day, sun reflecting through the mottled gray sky and directly into his eyes. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack stuffed in the pocket on his chest and lit it with a tiny white lighter that he carried when he wasn’t wearing pants. The ash-acid-smoke flavor burned on his tongue while he sat in a cloud of his own making. The smoke wouldn’t move in the breeze, trapped in the entryway of Lilia’s home.

Yuri crumpled forward, feeling exhaustion start to roll in behind his eyes, and pictured the boy on the motorcycle again. _Where was he? Was he alright? What, exactly, had scared him so much that night?_ Yuri set his jaw against the filter in his mouth and promised himself that he would figure it out, even just for the satisfaction of being right about something. He wasn’t normally this passionate – his last passion had been ripped out of his hands by his mother but this was something she couldn’t take away. Her face flitted in behind his eyelids and he got angry, again, despite the calming effects of the nicotine he was ingesting.

Yuri opened his eyes and watched a young mother with a small child walking hand-in-hand across the street.

He snubbed his cigarette out even though it was only half finished and stood, toeing his boots against the step just because, and went back inside.

Mila and Lilia seemed like they were deep in concentrated conversation when he came back in. They both jerked at the noise of the door opening and stared at him for just a half-second too long before pulling their heads apart and pretending to be casual, eyes tracking him as he walked over the hardwood with squeaking shoes and _fwumped_ back down into the chair.

“What?” He wasn’t going to just ignore the fact that they were talking about him. He’d never been of the mind that one should ignore bullies and popular girls and all of that bullshit. He always faced everything head-on, even when it left him the one with the self-satisfied black eye.

“If you ever want full control of your ability you need to learn to let go of your anger. It blankets you.” Lilia seemed like she was trying to make her words seem like constructive criticism but they were something Yuri already knew about himself. He might be a lot of things and he might not be even more things but self-aware was always something he could label himself as.

Yuri refused to answer her statement. He slid his eyes over to the window where the curtains rustled in the wind, and gave a non-committal shrug of his shoulders. He knew he was being childish but he didn’t much care because letting go of his anger because that meant making peace with the person he hated most and he wasn’t quite ready to bury the hatchet when he lived in her house.

“Let’s try again.” Lilia moved past the silent answer Yuri was giving with simple grace.

As Yuri closed his eyes Lilia began to swish-swish her cards again and Yuri latched on to the sound, hoping the repetitive noise of card against card would work better than fantasizing about smoking. He breathed in as she shuffled and breathed out when there was a pause. He pushed everything else down as far as it would go into his stomach, hoping it would be eaten alive by acid, and reached out again to Mila. He pictured her glittering blue eyes that sparkled too much for a normal human and tried to think about himself in her seat. He tried to feel her skin on his, or, rather her skin around his. He pictured opening his eyes and seeing himself, slouching in the seat in front of him, eyes blank with nothingness.

Still, though, he failed.

Frustration leaped up out of his gut and he pushed it back down with hands fisted in white cotton.

Swish-swish, breath in-out, reach across the table and take Mila’s brain into his. It was as simple as that.

All he saw was blackness and when he opened his eyes he saw Mila smirking at him.

He tried again and again and again and still he failed, anger starting to crawl up his throat and down into his lungs, burning him hot and alive like the sun at the beach.

At this point Yuri didn’t know how much time was passing. The only thing he could experience was his own breathing and Mila’s breathing and Lilia’s shuffling. The sun could have set and he would have missed it with his eyes closed, sitting next to the window that looked out over the river that separated Philly from Jersey. The time would have slipped through his balled fists.

Everything passes.

He reached out, harder this time, and again he failed.

Yuri huffed his breath out into the clouded room and opened his eyes again. He really was tired, now, from trying to leave his own body. More than that he felt even dumber than when he had entered and gotten spooked by the ghost of a woman who said she wanted to help on her own stone steps. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he sighed through his nose.

“How long does this normally take?” He asked when he could manage enough saliva to speak.

“I’d expect, for you, a month, maybe six weeks. If we work every day perhaps less.”

Panic struck Yuri in his gut, dislodging every feeling he had put down there.

“I don’t have that kind of fucking time. We have to figure something else out because this kid is in danger. You have no idea how scared he felt.” Yuri was rushing his words, tripping over himself in order to speak.

Lilia leveled with him, dark green eyes to light green eyes again.

“I can feel his fear lingering in you. I understand, child, but – “

“Then you’ve got to figure this out faster! I don’t know what the fuck else to do.” Yuri could feel his heart racing and he was back, again, to dripping his anger out of his mouth like nasty venom drool.

Lilia sat back in her chair and put her finger to her mouth as she thought. She looked a little like Viktor as she did this and Yuri was suddenly struck with the feeling that she may have been his teacher, too, somewhere down the line.

“Well, come back tomorrow. I have an idea. But wear comfortable shoes, not…those.” She eyes his boots under the table and Yuri pulled his feet back under his chair to hide them.

“These are comfortable.”

 

* * *

 

 

The following day was dreary to say the least. Heavy gray clouds blanketed the sky but still the air was hot and heavy on Yuri’s shoulders as he walked to the train station so he could head into the city for whatever else Lilia had planned for him. He kept the combat boots on out of spite because they really were comfortable, he’d broken them in well enough years ago, but he was wearing black ripped jeans and a cheetah print shirt with them. _Awesome fashion._

He shivered in the train’s cold air as it rattled down into the city. Burned out and abandoned buildings flit past him as he went through North Philly, and then past Temple University with all of its fake gentrification charm and buildings one hundred and fifty years old before going down into the ground at Jefferson.

The city was hot and damp with humidity as he walked through the permanently under construction mall Jefferson Station was built into and up to the surface of the street. In the wet air the city smelled like garbage. Typical.

The walk down to Lilia’s was faster than ever now that he had memorized the route. He walked past The Green Dragon which had taken up new residence on a side street along the way but its presence no longer surprised him. He was slowly getting used to all the magic shit in his life but certain things still unnerved him – the way the man with the black teeth saw him from the café window and smiled at him, for instance, or the way he was no longer sure if the weirdos he saw sitting on the sidewalks were just punks or if they were something else, something almost sinister with the way they let their eyes follow him while he walked. He had never felt eyes like those before but even if he had he wasn’t able to just say he was being paranoid anymore.

How many people were like Mila and could see through all his lies? How many people were like Lilia and could feel his waves of emotions as clear as he could? Maybe they were like Viktor, seemingly normal but in the know somehow. Maybe they were all something else.

Yuri, having learned his lesson from the previous day, banged on Lilia’s door instead of barging in. She opened the door dressed in gray swirling robes like smoke, hair up in its usual ballerina bun, and glittering rings adorning each finger. Yuri was suddenly convinced she simply owned the same outfit in different colors.

Behind her sat Viktor, silver hair matching his gray shirt and slacks.

“I’m not getting hypnotized, I don’t care if you’re the best.” Yuri said in lieu of a greeting. Viktor smirked at him.

“Don’t worry, Yurio, we’re doing something else today.”

A burst of anger flared in Yuri but he did his best to push it down, remembering his “lesson” from the day previous.

“First we have to go back to my house, though, because I’ve forgotten something. But it’s just around the corner.”

The anger Yuri pushed down burst up again. He scowled at Viktor, who didn’t seem to care, and he rolled his eyes for good measure as Viktor stood up out of his chair. He thanked Lilia for reading his fortune which made Yuri look down at an array of colorful Tarot cards spread out on the table and then he was out of the door, Yuri in tow.

Just around the corner turned into a twenty minute walk up Pine Street, past old churches and modern rowhomes smashed together on the blocks. Some of the side streets were cobblestone and some of the houses were Colonial but mostly Pine Street was made of people there were busy and harried looking, all with folded umbrellas in their anticipatory hands.

On the corner of one of the side streets was a [run-down looking house](https://68.media.tumblr.com/7a140c5eaf7a1f849351102ee46d9585/tumblr_ottkzwqzp51su8rbvo1_1280.jpg) with ivy growing up the sides and off-color curtains hanging in the windows. The bricks looked like they were about to crumble off the siding and even the little sign advertising a security system looked too old to count for much.

“My friend Georgi lives there. Moved in after his coven got kicked out of [the Divine Lorraine](http://www.ocfrealty.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/IMG_0817.jpg) when it got bought out by developers.” Viktor explained in a casual tone. Yuri didn’t respond. Instead he let his eyes linger on the house, which looked like it had been abandoned for years, and continued to stare as they walked past. There was something weird about the house and it wasn’t just the odd placement of a full house, not a rowhome-turned-apartment-building, in the middle of the city. A white cat with blue eyes sat in the window box and stared at Yuri just as hard.

“I told him he should move into the [Boner Forever building](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3204/2325151964_b742197890.jpg) but he didn’t find that funny.” Viktor laughed at his own joke. Yuri rolled his eyes.

Viktor’s house was only a few blocks away from Georgi’s and despite its garish nature Yuri wasn’t at all surprised at what it looked like. Viktor’s pink convertible was parked on the side street, roof up. Green plants grew in the windows which weren’t too bad but the house itself was [bright, sunshine yellow](https://68.media.tumblr.com/4396ef05f8606ab6cce5f1ed00fc612f/tumblr_ottkzwqzp51su8rbvo6_1280.jpg). The entire building stood out against the brick apartments next to it. It was hideous in only a way that Viktor could create – a standout piece that was impossible to look away from even though you wanted to.

“You seriously live her? You and Yuuri?” Yuri asked, incredulous.

“Yes! Just wait outside, though, I need to grab my notebook.” Viktor looked pleased with himself, which Yuri was starting to figure out was the standard case, as he jogged inside and then out again with a little silver notebook in his hands. There was a pen tucked into the spine that, too, was silver. Yuri began to suspect he dressed in all monochrome like Lilia. Maybe Lilia gave something of her own to all of her students.

  
“Now we can start our tour! This is something I like to do for a lot of my new patients, especially those that didn’t know about all of this “magic shit” as you would say.” Viktor explained. He looked excited which made Yuri nervous.

“Tour? You know I live in this fucking city, right?”

“Yes but you’ve never seen its secrets the way we have. We’ll start at City Hall and move on from there.”

“How is this supposed to help me?” Yuri was extremely suspicious of the whole thing – a sightseeing tour was in no way going to help him find the boy on the motorcycle unless they literally ran into him which, Yuri suspected, was extremely unlikely. He squinted into the sun behind his sunglasses, refusing to look at Viktor where he stood with a heart-shaped smile on his face.

“You won’t feel so out of your depth when you realize what’s around you and what tools you have. Come, now, young Yurio, I’ll make it the short version since you’re so grumpy.”

Viktor skipped away from where they stood in the reflected yellow light of his house.

City Hall was as it normally was – overrun with lost tourists and angry commuters. It smelled like piss and trash and there were kids playing in the fountains of Dilworth because their parents didn’t care about them getting ringworm from all the strangers. The gray stone of the building meshed into the gray sky that still held back its rain, thankfully, though Yuri was regretting not bringing an umbrella at this point. He looked up to the statue of William Penn, caged in for repairs, and then back over to Viktor who was scribbling something in his book.

“Are you going to tell me the statues here are real people trapped in stone?”

“Of course not. Although some of the people in the murals around the city are real. Witches will curse you into one if they feel angry enough. But no, this is just the middle of the city and a good place to start our little lesson.” Viktor pulled Yuri by his hand into the middle of City Hall. The building was square with a courtyard of stone in the middle and unused subway steps built into it. On the ground was a mosaic of the night sky with stars and planets tracked out, probably built in by some terrified little Puritan trying to appease an angry Christian God.

“What’s your sign?” Viktor asked, looking down at the star map.

“Pisces.”

“Mm, makes sense. Intuitive, artistic, generous, and caring are some of the more common traits in Pisces. I can see that in you.”

“Doubt it.” Yuri scoffed. He’d never put much faith in horoscopes and he wasn’t about to start now, even after all the strangeness he’d been exposed to.

“You’re training with an extremely gifted psychic just to find a boy you’ve never met because you think maybe-possibly he’s kinda-sorta in danger. And you want to apologize. I’d say that’s rather generous and caring.”

Yuri frowned down at the blue and gold mosaic, choosing not to say anything.

Their first stop was Rittenhouse Square, a small but crowded park that took up the equivalent of one city block if not less. It was full of rich people who had just finished eating lunch at neighboring restaurants and uppity young professionals walking their dogs and kids running around hollering their heads off as their parents chased them.

“Before the city grew up around it this was the home of the original Philadelphia Seelie Court. The fae didn’t much like the city as it got bigger, though, so they moved out over near Wissahickon. But every once in a while you’ll find the fair folk back here, mourning their homeland.”

Yuri looked around the tiny park. Yeah, it was nice but he couldn’t tell why anyone would want to come back to it if they had all of Wissahickon to play in.

“Are you a particularly nostalgic person, Yurio?” Viktor asked, looking down. He had his notebook out like he was ready to record the conversation even though they weren’t back on his couch today.

“Not really.” Yuri answered. He wiped sweat from his brow as he did so, wishing he had worn shorts.

“Well imagine living here for hundreds of years and being kicked out because of a couple of stranger showed up. That’s what cities do, especially to people like us. We’re always a little strangled by the iron.”

“I guess.”

They continued to walk past Rittenhouse and made their way down Lombard until they hit an old Colonial church with six statues built in front of it, three on either side. The statues were [huge white marble things](https://68.media.tumblr.com/81e73b7fe438f81d927f4fc140f572c8/tumblr_ottkzwqzp51su8rbvo4_1280.jpg) that loomed higher than the doorway of the building, each in a different pose. They seemed to be watching over a small lawn of grass that a man in a blue suit was trimming with sheers around the edge of the brick wall and fence that surrounded the whole thing. Yuri peered through the wrought iron bars and looked up at the statues.

“The statues were built to guard over the land that’s in front of them. The Seelie and Unseelie made a pact there back during the Revolution. I don’t remember what the pact was about, exactly, but if the ground is disturbed enough to dislodge the magic the statues will come to life to put everything back together again.”

Yuri squinted up at the statues and examined their worn faces.

“You’re making that up.”

“No! I have a copy of the original pact at home. I’m a bit of an amateur historian these days. Needed a hobby to keep me distracted.”

Yuri turned to glare at Viktor who was shining with an almost child-like honesty. His grin was big and his eyes twinkled as he looked down at Yuri.

“Come on, we’re close to the next place.”

They walked over to Pine again and down a few blocks until they hit an old Revolutionary-era cemetery. The headstones were worn like the statues up on Lombard and hard to read. Half of them were falling over or cracked and some of them had plaques in front of them in place of the original carvings. The iron fence around the whole thing was falling apart, nearly collapsed onto the sidewalk.

The strangest thing, though, was a tree stump that was carved into a [statue of a man](https://68.media.tumblr.com/d1f85ada09856239706aa6dc11639ece/tumblr_ottkznZoLp1su8rbvo2_1280.jpg). It towered over everything, nearly ten or eleven feet tall, and made Yuri feel very peculiar when he looked at it, like he was looking at an optical illusion. The statue made him queasy.

“What’s the deal with him?” Yuri asked, pointing up to the back of the statue from the sidewalk.

“Originally he was just a tree the church had to cut down because the roots were growing too much. They carved him just as a piece of plain art but I heard he got enchanted to look over the cemetery by some of the witches in the city. There’s been talk of necromancers trying to bring back older and older bodies but most people don’t like that kind of thing so here we are.” Viktor shrugged Yuri’s question off as soon as he was done answering it.

“What I really wanted to show you, Yurio, was this.” Viktor walked into the cemetery, down a little stone path that was roped off and led to the back wall of the yard. In the brick, there, were large vertical stone slabs that looked like headstones built into the wall.

“People in your community are often forced to change and adapt. [These graves](https://68.media.tumblr.com/37e5ca858ce829f58f7c7107cb844270/tumblr_ottkzwqzp51su8rbvo5_1280.jpg), here, were once freestanding - they were built for a few people with gifts that died in the Revolution but, as the city grew, there wasn’t room for them, so your people tried to get together and save the graves. This was a bit of a compromise – they’re built into the wall now so they can’t go anywhere but they’re not quite real graves, either. They’re in the middle, a bit like you are, now.”

“I don’t know what the fuck that means.” Yuri felt cold despite the weather and he felt angry despite Viktor’s tone. This kind of roundabout health-guru shit bothered him. If people couldn’t be blunt what was the fucking point of giving advice, anyway?

“If you want to see your boy again and save him from whatever you think is troubling him you’re going to need to become more like the middle. Holding true to what you believe but changing so you can fit into a new world.”

“I don’t know what the fuck that means.” Yuri parroted. This time, though, even he could hear how distant his voice was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to Voxane for proofing this. You saved my ass. 
> 
> Yeah, all those links are for real places, even the Boner Forever building. Philly is wonderful. 
> 
> Up next: more training, Yuuri's deal, and something new.


	6. Midnight Snack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first step is always to learn to let go.

Yuri continued to visit Lilia’s most days in an effort to train. He plopped down in her hard chairs and stared at Mila, when she was free, and listened to the sound of shuffling cards but didn’t make a lot of tangible progress much to his own frustration. His head was full of white static noise, like the old TV that his grandfather kept in his bedroom, and stuffing his energy down into the pit of his stomach didn’t work anymore. But still he went, hoping for a breakthrough.

Viktor took him to more places around the city and explained their magical histories even though Yuri still didn’t see the point. Learning about a community he didn’t much care for was just getting in the way of finding the boy on the motorcycle as far as he was concerned and he made sure to tell Viktor this, and Lilia this, and he told Mila too not that she cared. She’d been on the same tours, apparently, and thought it was worthwhile. Every time Viktor made him walk around the middle of the city in the blazing heat Yuri’s frustrations mounted, no matter how hard he tried to will them away to appease Lilia, as he felt time slipping by.

After a week and a half Yuri was angrier, if that was really possible, at how little progress he’s noticed within himself. He tried, every day, to reach out to the boy on the motorcycle but still couldn’t find him no matter how much he focused on his face and hair and little scars and all of the other details he’d picked out from the two visits he’d had. A sense of subtle dread hung around him like a cloud, following him in and out of Lilia’s shop and to Heaven’s Diner and into his own bedroom as he began to realize that he might never be able to find the boy he was looking for.

No matter what he did he couldn’t distract himself from gut-mushing worry and the cruel anger that followed.

He could tell Viktor was getting antsy, too, when he was around. He looked nervous and tired sometimes and straight-up on edge other times. He was more and more anxious as their trips went on and Yuri figured it was because Viktor wasn’t used to being a failure – as frustrated as he was with himself a small part of him was very self-satisfied to be giving the old man such trouble. He laughed to himself about it out on the fire escape some evenings as he smoked, alone, and watched the sun set.

Despite this, at two weeks out, Yuri was beginning to feel really desperate. He’d barely been able to creep into Mila’s head, feeling like he was touching her skull instead of getting into her brain, and progress everywhere was slow. He was starting to say to himself that he would do anything to find the boy on the motorcycle again.

Maybe Viktor and Lilia were sensing that, too, because as two weeks became two and half Viktor said he was taking Yuri on his final field trip of magical nonsense.

“I think this one will really help. We’re going to visit someone I haven’t seen in a long time but I’ve already made arrangements, and they were hard to do, so you don’t get to back out just because we have to drive there.”

Yuri wasn’t terribly excited to go on one last adventure with Viktor so with a scowl already in place Yuri rolled up to the bright yellow house and got into his pink convertible the next day, noting that there was no Yuuri in sight before they sped off northwards through the run down parts of the city that earned them even more strange looks than they got in the city center. Up here the roads were a little worse and the houses were a little sad and the residents were more forgotten by City Hall than anyone else. They drove through, though, into the suburbs where everything was nice and shiny, and then through that too, into the greenery of Wissahickon.

“Visiting the fairies?” Yuri presumed.

“While we’re here make sure you say Fae. Just as a note.” Viktor responded from behind his dark black sunglasses.

“Mmm.” Yuri hummed in response.

The forest overtook them slowly while late afternoon light filtered through the leaves onto the dirt road they were driving on. Yuri was suspicious what Viktor’s car wouldn’t be able to handle anything rougher than the gravel they drove over but he declined to say anything, too enraptured in the wide river they drove next to and the steep hills, nearly cliffs, that rose up above them on the right of their car.

Although he lived fairly close Yuri had never been to the park until now, and he started to regret it as he saw everyone around him. It was full of hikers even as the sun began to set and after they parked the car, pulled up the roof, and began to walk down the paths themselves Yuri saw kids swimming in the twilight river and had an inexplicable urge to join them tugging at his legs. Dirt crunched under his black boots as he and Viktor hiked along the river towards some unknown destination, his eyes trailing the water the whole way.

Viktor and he walked in silence, for the most part. The only words spoken between them were the occasional direction from Viktor as they traveled off the main path and through dirt trails in the forest, up the steep hills and cliffs, through the mud, and deeper into the woods than Yuri suspected they were supposed to go. The trail they were on was no longer marked.

“The best time to see the Fae, here, is just after sunset. It’ll be dark before we see them but their lights will turn on soon afterwards. Don’t be surprised by anything you see. Even the Seelie are fickle.” Viktor’s voice was soft as they crept on through the woods as if he was afraid of disturbing something in the air with unnecessary noise. Yuri didn’t respond, again, choosing to heed his warning and take note of his surroundings even more than he had previously in the gray light of the evening.

His legs were starting to hurt as they kept walking through more and more treacherous ground – over moss covered rocks and roots that looked like they were put in place just for the possibility of tripping lost hikers. His eyes felt tired from straining in the poor lighting but he dared not pull out his phone for guidance. He began to feel nervous, more so than his usual state when he and Viktor went on city-wide adventures, and his nervousness scared him.

As they approached the crest of the hill they were hiking up, cool air surrounding Yuri’s naked arms and making him shiver despite the time of year, Yuri began to smell flowers and old, must perfume and clean water if such a thing had a smell. The area they were approaching had a soft orange glow peeking through the trees and coming over the top of the hill, making the light look like it was rolling down towards him. Yuri could hear whispers of something but he couldn’t tell what it was – he was reminded of the soft shuffling of Lilia’s desk of Tarot cards, _swish_ _swish_ against the wind and smoke in her office.

At the top of the hill Yuri stood closer to Viktor than perhaps he meant to, but the scene in front of him made his skin feel hot and cold all at once, like it couldn’t decide if this was a good or bad place to be. White mushrooms, growing taller than they would have naturally, sprung up from the brown dirt earth in a perfect circle cleared of trees in the forest. Figures lingered inside and outside the ring, dancing and walking and talking to each other with noises that sounded like cicadas clicking. Sometimes the figures would blink out of existence for a second only to reappear in a slightly different position or location. Yuri couldn’t get a firm grasp on the Fae as they milled about in the clearing that was full of wavy, mottled light despite no obvious signs of its origin.

The Fae all looked different from one another – some had unnaturally colored skin, some had milky white eyes that sank into their faces like Yuri’s neighbor Ekaterina and some had bugged out black orbs in their heads that were too large to be safe. Some looked like any human stranger he would see on the streets. They had wings, some torn, some huge and dragging on the ground, and some small and fluttery like gauze against the breeze. They all spoke with open, cruel mouths full of sharp and broken teeth in chattering clicks and dots of sound in the black night sky.

Yuri’s skin decided it wanted to be freezing snow cold and he shivered in the air which should have been warm, but wasn’t.

Viktor began to walk towards the circle of white mushrooms but skirted around it, refusing to enter even though he walked close to the invisible border, and Yuri followed, careful not to step inside the ring. They walked along the edge towards the northernmost end where a figure sat in a huge chair made of tree branches and roots, seemingly grown directly out of the forest. The tree branches-cum-throne twisted around the figure, like they were embracing him, even though he reached out of their grasp towards a dancing woman.

The figure in the throne was tall, limbs unnaturally long and his skin was so pale it was almost blue in the haze of light. His hair was dark and shaved like the motorcycle boy’s but his face was cruel and unafraid – his snub nose was wrinkled as he watched the woman dance with sharp blue eyes. A crown of bent and tarnished gold sat atop his head, perched gently on his hair, and it did not move even as he turned his head to trail his eyes along the woman’s body.

The woman looked like she was made to match the King – that’s what he had to be. Her crown was made of the same spun and brittle looking gold, and her hair was dark too. She danced to silent music and pulled her cherry red lips up against the cracked and crooked teeth that filled her mouth. She looked hungry.

They stared at each other, never taking their eyes off of one another, even as Viktor and Yuri stood silently in front of them in the dark night. They stood for a few solid minutes, waiting for this King of sorts to turn his eyes towards them, in the ice cold air of the ring. Just as Yuri opened his mouth to say something, to make the asshole King look at them and not the dancing woman, Viktor silently placed his hand on Yuri’s arm, urging him to stay quiet.

So they waited, and waited, standing perfectly still as the King watched the woman dance and ordered wine and other treats for himself and his guests. They waited, silently, in the awful and unnatural light of the mushroom ring.

Yuri’s knees began to ache from standing up so straight but Viktor’s stillness told him he shouldn’t be moving either. So he waited.

Yuri watched the Fae out of the corner of his eyes – he refused to stop watching this King even though he wasn’t paying any attention back. Yuri saw how they danced with each other in the moonlight, gossamer wings glittering in the night air, and he watched them touch each other and speak to one another even though he didn’t understand what they were saying. They moved like some kind of combination of human and bug – skittering and jumping even as they walked. They had no movement in their hips but still managed to glide across the dark brown and wet earth. Their steps sent chills down Yuri’s already frozen spine.

The woman twisted in front of the King like she was trying to seduce him. She had jewels around her neck and on her hands and her body was dressed in a thin white dress that clung to her as she twirled. A lot of the Fae were naked, insect bodies gleaming in the light, but some had clothing like hers – light and barely there – and still some were fully dressed with armor and swords at their hips.

She danced towards where Viktor and Yuri stood in the night, the buzz of an unknown language around them, but she twisted as she approached like she didn’t want to touch them. Her eyes glittered as she looked at them and moved around them like she was trying to get their attention even though she already had it. As her feet tamped the ground Yuri began to hear the pattern of her movements, soft and in the dirt.

Her hands reached out, in time with the beat her feet created, and she pulled Yuri and Viktor closer to the King who had finally turned his eyes towards them. He was smiling in a way that made molten lava fear pool in Yuri’s stomach, warming him from the inside out. Her skin, in comparison, was cold like the air was, despite her vigorous dancing. As they approached the King she winked at Yuri and Viktor before letting go of their hands and flitting off to dance with other Fae.

The king looked down from his wooden throne, an appraising look on his face.

“Viktor, will you please tell me why you’ve brought yet another human here?” His voice was low and gravely and he said all his vowels wrong like he wasn’t used to speaking in a language that wasn’t made of cicada clicks.

“Your Highness, I’m trying to teach him something and I thought meeting you would help.” Viktor’s voice was carefully passive; it belied none of his usual excitement or enthusiasm – it was even, and calm, and nothing true to himself.

The King stepped down from his throne of wood, red and white wings trailing behind him like a cloak, naked as the day he was born. He walked over to where Viktor and Yuri stood and leveled his face with Yuri’s. They were nearly close enough to kiss, not that Yuri was about to move from the spot he had been rooted to.

“Who are you?” The King whispered at him, predatory and quiet.

“Yuri.”

“Ah, how sweet, Viktor’s collected another Yuri. Tell me Viktor, is your Yuuri in our out?” Yuri scrunched his brows, not understanding.

“He’s out, but he’s coming around faster than ever.”

“That’s good to hear. Remember, if you ever want me to solve your problem I can. Now, tell me what you need.” The King had turned, now, and was walking back to his throne as he spoke, wings brushing the ground behind his feet. Despite his seeming disinterest in the conversation that he himself started there was some kind of pressure in his voice that Yuri couldn’t place. The offer sounded more like a threat than anything else and judging by Viktor’s tense shoulders he thought so to.

“All I want is to show Yuri how to make a compromise with himself.”

The King turned at that, looking intrigued, and peered down at Viktor and Yuri.

“Ah, I see.”

 

* * *

 

 

Yuri sat at a wooden table, grown out of trees like the King’s throne, with food and wine in front of him that he dared not touch. He didn’t need Viktor’s soft, guiding hand to tell him that eating Fae food was a bad move, not when he had grown up above a shop that sold books full of that kind of information. He had never thought he would need to employ it is all.

Even though he refused to drink the wine in the metal cup in front of him he could smell the earthiness of it – it wasn’t grape wine but something else, something darker and more dangerous that would trap him in the world of the Fae the second it passed his lips. Half his brain was revolted but the other half was screaming at him to pick the cup up and down it all in one go, to trap himself here as a plaything of some strange and terrifying creatures in the woods. Yuri clasped his hands tight in his lap, refusing to let his arms move without his permission.

At the banquet table sat Viktor, the King and the Queen, and quite a few other members of the court. They chattered in their own clicking and hissing tongue and glared at Yuri and Viktor like they hated them or like they wanted them to leave and they drank their wine with smiling, dangerous mouths.

The cold air swirled around them as the King leaned into the table to speak. He sat at one end, while Viktor and Yuri sat at the other, meaning they had to keep their voices up to hear each other of the sound of the trees rustling in the wind.

“So, Viktor, you want me to teach little Yuri about compromise? You must be desperate to come all the way out to my court just for a little history lesson.”

Viktor smiled but otherwise didn’t answer. He looked incredibly uncomfortable being spoken to and Yuri couldn’t blame him, not when he watched the King’s tongue flick out of his mouth to lick away drops of dark black wine from his lips after he finished speaking. The King turned his blue eyes over to Yuri and gave him a look that weighed him down with exhaustion – creeping tendrils of anxiety wrapped around Yuri’s arms and legs and head, making him feel heavy with some kind of laden dread. He felt like he’d had a panic attack an hour ago – tired, embarrassed, and wanting to run away from the spot he was rooted to by nothing more than watery irises.  

“Little Yuri,” the King hissed at him “I’m the first of my kind. I took over the Seelie Court once the old King fucked off to New York when he got bored but I’m not from this court originally. I brought the Seelie and Unseelie together out here in our little park. It took a bit of work.”

He sipped at his cup of wine and picked up a piece of whatever food he had with a twisted fork. He ate with his mouth open, showing off his jaw that was a little too wide to look right in his semi-human face.

“Last summer there was a…vacancy of the throne and I saw my opportunity. It’s been a year and so far everything’s been working out well. All I had to do was learn how to work a new culture. Fairly simple.”

He bit into his food again and dropped a hand into his Queen’s lap. She smirked down at the court members sitting at the table.

“What seems to be troubling you, little Yuri? What can I help you with?”

Yuri could hear the threat in his request but pressed through, ignoring it.

“I need to find someone but to do so I have to learn how to master something. It’s…hard.” He avoided the details, not wanting to give the King any ammunition. He didn’t like the way he smiled at him or watched him or spoke about things. He didn’t like this at all.

“I could find him for you. It’s pretty easy, I could send a knight down into the city.” He sounded casual, but the kind of casual that covered up something more sinister.

“I’d like to do it myself.”

“Suit yourself, I suppose, but the offer always stands.” His nearly-human eyes bore into Yuri, making him want to get up and run.

Viktor cleared his throat and spoke up, finally, breaking the uncomfortable silence that was beginning to settle at the table when Yuri didn’t respond to what the King had said.

“Yuri needs to learn how to middle himself. I thought you were good at that, is all.”

The King laughed, or Yuri figured he was probably laughing because the noise he made was completely inhuman – he sounded like a fox screaming in the night or like a coyote howling at the moon. He sounded wild as he grinned, stretching his glimmering skin back far enough to show his molars. His laughter, though, was nothing like the way he moved – fast and uncanny, scuttling over the top of the table to where Yuri was sat until their faces were close again. He smelled like wine and bread, like flowers and rot.

“Viktor’s taken you for a ride if he thinks I know anything about middling. Listen, kid, you gotta reach deep down inside yourself,” the King pressed his finger, which Yuri saw had one too many joints, to Yuri’s chest, “and think about what it is that you want. Power? Easy. Respect? Easy. Letting go of your own past? That’s more difficult but kids like you always need to learn to let go if they wanna win. Do you wanna win, Yuri?”

Yuri swallowed.

“You wanna win. You’re a winner, baby.” The King pressed a kiss to Yuri’s forehead and stepped away, walking back over the table and sitting back down in his throne with another scream of laughter.

“By the way, kid, next time you’re up my way just call me King JJ. We’re friends, you know.”

Viktor stood, grabbed Yuri, and yanked him up from where he was sitting, stunned, and marched them back into the dark black forest.

 

* * *

 

“I’m sorry. He’s not always like that.”

“Mmm.”

 

* * *

 

Yuri crawled in his own skin as he stepped into the apartment he shared with his mom and grandfather, walking into his bedroom in the darkness. Whatever Viktor thought was going to happen clearly hadn’t. He felt itchy as he lay on his old blanket and listened to the creak of the box fan in his window. It was nights like these that he wished he still danced so he could work through positions and moves and exercises until his limbs ached and he couldn’t think of anything anymore. He just wasn’t tired, no matter how he posed himself in bed, as adrenalin from whatever the hell that meeting had been was still pumping through his veins.

Sometimes on restless nights like these he would draw but his mind for art had been torn in two recently. His mom had done that to him, yelling at him months ago as he tried to sketch her, to reach out to her, and he still couldn’t make anything worthwhile aside from some doodles of people he met during the day. It just wasn’t right anymore.

He just wanted to move until he ached and felt silence in his head. He got up and paced, instead of dancing, not knowing what else he had left. He felt loose in his own body, energy rending his joints apart and putting them back together all wrong. He felt like he was one big cracked knuckle as he walked around in his room and stared at his pacing form in his mirror.

Yuri had a lot of experience with restless nights, especially these days. Sweat dripped down his back and his neck and his ass as he tossed and turned, walked around, and tried going through basic ballet positions in an attempt to settle down. He smoked out on the fire escape, his last cigarette of the pack, and with his head against the siding of the house he pictured the boy on the motorcycle. He was entering obsessive territory.

The boy was handsome, that was obvious, but it was the calm of the first visit and the fear of the second that brought Yuri back time and time again. The heart-racing panic made Yuri feel guilty and attached in some way, even though he knew he wasn’t responsible for the feelings themselves. The crash, though, and the unrelenting blackness that followed was a different, horrible story. This boy was out there, possibly in some hospital alone, in some unknown state and city and Yuri knew it was his fucking fault at the end of the day. His stomach twisted with nicotine nausea so Yuri snubbed his cigarette out against the gritty iron and breathed in the night air instead. It was cool despite the summer and placating in a way despite Yuri’s anxiety. In and out, _swish swish_ , everything Lilia and Viktor had taught him that didn’t help was running through Yuri’s head out on the fire escape. He felt small and bursting at the seams.

Sighing and trying to shake the fuzziness of too many thoughts in his head Yuri stepped back inside his room, and then through the door and down the hall to head towards the tiny kitchen and even smaller dining table. Pacing hadn’t helped and a cigarette had done nothing so the next step in his usual routine for endless waking nights was food, only, he wasn’t alone in the dining room this time around. Grandpa was sitting at the table shuffling through the mail with only the small light above his head and a tinny radio that was playing more static than baseball to keep him company.

Nikolai Plisetsky had many strange habits that Yuri had grown up to know and love – his tendency to listen to baseball late in the night, the scratching of his moustache when he was thinking about something, and the little sigh he did whenever mom started yelling were all wrinkles folded into Yuri’s brain at a young age. Grandpa baked bread with the best of them and sold crystals that he didn’t believe in and made Yuri feel like telling the truth just for fun.

Grandpa hummed as Yuri rooted through the near-empty fridge. He hadn’t gone shopping in a while so all he got for his efforts was a chocolate pudding, not wanting to eat anything that could be used for breakfast. With a spoon in his mouth he moved to go back to his room, eyes downcast, before being called over.

“I was wondering when you were going to come out of your room, Yuratchka.”

Yuri stared, suddenly unsure of what to say, unopened pudding in his hand and silver spoon clinking against his teeth.

“I could hear you pacing around in there. Come sit.”

Yuri pulled out one of the three chairs that sat around the table, scraping the legs against the old and battered hardwood. He looked at his grandfather in front of him, his two-tone moustache and beard, his deep lines in his skin despite his relative young age, and his eyes that still sparkled behind his droopy eyelids and bushy eyebrows. Yuri could see that he used to be handsome, or maybe still was in an old-person way, and he felt his throat get tight as he realized that he was likely the reason for many of the lines on his grandfather’s face.

“Who do you keep seeing in the city? You’re not normally down there this often.” Grandpa’s voice was deep and gravelly, like it always was, but he was quiet in a way that only happened when he fought with mom or missed Grandma.

“Um, just some friends.” Yuri offered, knowing his grandfather wasn’t going to buy the lie but not knowing how else to explain it all. Grandpa didn’t know about the visits and he definitely didn’t know about the boy on the motorcycle and Yuri wasn’t about to explain all of that but he didn’t quite know what else to say in this situation.

Grandpa’s lips curled up into a small, knowing smile. “Anyone I should know about?” He asked with a quirk of his eyebrow.

Yuri turned red under his grandfather’s gaze.

“No, not like that.” _I’m just chasing a boy whose name I don’t know across the country using my weird brain power and the tutelage of a hypnotherapist and fake-ass psychic._ _And now, apparently, the advice of fairy Kings. Just normal teenager shit._

Grandpa stopped shuffling through the envelopes and papers in front of him, setting them to the side. He used to hide the yellow and red past-due bills from Yuri until he started working and throwing in money every month to help out. Now, it was just another stack of mail they both wanted to forget for a moment the same way their sore muscles and aching backs were forgotten when they had dinner together.

“When is it going to be like that, eh?” Grandpa was leaning into Yuri’s space, a mischievous grin on his face. Sometimes Grandpa would tease Yuri about things but it was never in the same way his mom teased him for things; Grandpa picked at small thing, not bruises and he did it with a smile instead of a shout.

Yuri spooned chocolate pudding into his mouth and refused to answer, grinning anyway. Despite his restlessness and the lingering pin pricks of worry under his skin from the awful light in the fairy ring Grandpa was able to make him just a little bit calmer. Yuri cocked his head to the side and swallowed.

“Not my fault that mom never wanted me bringing friends over.” It wasn’t a barbed statement, just a truth they both recognized and didn’t talk about – they didn’t need to, at least not anymore. Yuri’s mom had hated all of his friends and pulled him out of ballet and discouraged him from going to college his whole life. Her excuse was that his friends were loud and messy and that ballet and college were too expensive but Yuri figured that she had tried to keep him alone even though she wasn’t around to be with him either. Instead she let him sit in his bedroom by himself and go to work at a midnight diner and not do much else besides walk around in a haze of too many thoughts and occasional trips of the other side of the world.

She’d had Yuri too young and his father left the second he found out so it had just been her for a little, and then she moved back in with Grandpa, and now it was the three of them in a tiny apartment, constantly tense and fighting. Sometimes, though, when it was just Yuri and Grandpa sharing the space things felt calm. Yuri wasn’t uncomfortable in his chair when she was gone and he didn’t hole himself up in his room to avoid anyone. Being around Grandpa was nice like that.

Nikolai smiled, a little sadly.

“I can’t blame you for wanting to leave.”

They hadn’t outright discussed Yuri’s departure from the household but they both knew it was coming. They both knew why Yuri worked so much and why he’d started to give away old clothes.

“Eh, I can’t leave you alone old man. You’d die without me around.” Now it was Yuri’s turn to tease, pointing out something that might be a little close to true but saying it with a smile anyway.

“Well why don’t we compromise like families are supposed to do? Come and visit me as much as you can and I won’t make you feel too bad for leaving.”

Yuri could see where this conversation was going, he could see what Grandpa was really talking about, what he was always talking about and trying to make Yuri talk about. He could see what he always avoided. He could see his Grandpa begging him not to turn his back despite everything that had gone wrong in their lives. He could see the sadness in his eyes – sad for the loss of his wife, the half-death of his daughter who used to be so happy and kind but now existed in a fugue state of anger and alcohol, and the inevitable departure of his grandson who he loved more than anything.

“Sometimes I’m madder at you than I am at her.”

“I know.”

“But it’s because I love you. You’ve always been there when I needed it, even if it was when I needed you to stand in between me and her. And it really pisses me off that that’s what’s going on, you know? It makes me fucking mad.”

Yuri set the spoon down on the old table with its wood laminate peeling at the corners and a red nail polish stain on the edge from the first time Yuri tried to paint his nails and got caught by his mom who yelled at him for being girly.

Yuri continued. “And it’s like, all this fucking shit isn’t our faults. But some of it is her fault. And then some of it is your fault because you can’t stop her. So I guess some of it is my fault, too, and I just get frustrated with it all. Like, I don’t understand what the fuck I did to make her treat me like this and I don’t know how to make it better. I don’t fucking get it so I’m just going to leave, I guess, but then you’ll be alone and…Fuck, I just don’t know.”

Yuri stopped, seeing how tightly his fists were clenched in his lap, skin white and tight across his knuckles. He took a breath, smelling the stale old-cigarette air of the apartment which meant mom had been smoking inside again even though she said she wasn’t going to anymore.

“Take a deep breath.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You have too many troubles for a kid.”

“What do you do when you hurt someone bad enough that you think they might not get better?”

Despite the non-sequitur Yuri wasn’t changing the subject, trusting Grandpa to understand.

Nikolai settled back in his chair and looked at Yuri thoughtfully. A lot of their conversations were like this – lighthearted at first and very suddenly meaningful, like they needed to joke and prod at each other first to make sure it would be alright to talk about something more important. Yuri’s throat was tight and painful as he looked at Grandpa, who so often gave him the room he needed, and gave him time, and love, and money, and everything else he asked for. He wanted to give that back but he had no idea how to be patient with someone he didn’t know the name of. He couldn’t be patient with himself or with his mom. He could barely be patient with the person he loved the most and just so happened to be sitting across from.

“Every time you reach out you run the risk of accidently pushing someone away. Sometimes you have to let them come to you. Look at them, see what they’re doing, and give them space to do that until they want to change.”

“Sounds like you’re telling me to give up.” Yuri’s voice was quiet and a little hoarse, not that he would ever admit that he was on the verge of frustrated tears in his kitchen in the middle of the night.

“No, not giving up. Just working hard in a different way.”                    

 

* * *

 

 

In the morning Yuri awoke dead tired – his sleep had been meaningless. Despite this a fire burned in his belly as he got dressed without a care in the world about what his outfit was going to look like and hurried out of the house with his grandpa’s words swirling in his head. They mixed with the King’s, “You have to let go of your past” and with Lilia’s _swish swish_ of Tarot cards as she demanded Yuri learn to have an iron grip on his whirlwind emotions, and they mixed with Viktor insisting he middle himself.

Yuri finally knew what he had to do and he was going to chase that feeling to the ends of the Earth. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised y'all that we would figure out what Yuuri's deal was and I lied!! I'm sorry!! I promise it'll happen in Chapter 7 since you have been so patient with me. As an added bonus maybe we'll see Otabek again sooner rather than later. I DID say this was going to be a slow burn! ;)


	7. Agape (Or Some Shit)

Yuri couldn’t feel the heat on his back as he power-walked through the city, pushing past the tourists, punks, and late-morning commuters on the sidewalk. His boots stomped on the ground and his sunglasses continued to slide down his sweaty face but he didn’t take the time to care about it, instead just leaving them to dangle on the end of his nose. Being woken up with inspiration didn’t leave him a lot of wiggle room – sometimes you have to ride the wave, just like Grandpa would say. 

Laura Jane Grace was yelling in his ear through his headphones,  _ Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?  _

The air was as thick as the crowds and the clouds overhead did nothing to protect Yuri’s skin from the sun but still he made his way through the city as fast as he could without running – no need to hurt himself. He knew where he was going.

Yuri went over the bridge that spanned the Schuylkill River and headed over to Viktor’s office. He was so focused he wasn’t itching for a cigarette, even though his pack was weighing down his back pocket, stuffed in there by habit alone. Homes and small restaurant and bars became larger, more intimidating buildings as he approached the area around Viktor’s office. The gray stone loomed like walls around him on the street, trying to push him inside.

Viktor’s building was the same as ever, though, cold and polished and uninhabited opulence. The gold and dark wood elevator inside the building shook the same way Yuri did - gently, but enough to be noticed and worried after. He itched with anticipation, shifting his weight impatiently as the elevator slowly climbed up to the right floor. He was out of the doors before they fully opened.

“Nikiforov!” Yuri yelled, banging on the door to his office. He knew he was likely interrupting a patient but he didn’t have time to worry about that. He had places to be.

Viktor cracked the heavy door, a frown already in place on his face. Through the space between the door and the frame Yuri could see a tall man, taller than anyone he had ever seen before, with long white hair sitting on the couch in the middle of the room. His skin looked like bark. Yuri wrenched his eyes away from the man and settled them back on Viktor, feeling like he had seen something – someone – he was never meant to and not just for doctor-patient confidentiality reasons.

“Where’s your husband?” A pinched expression appeared on Viktor’s face for a millisecond before being smoothed out by the frown he had settled on when he opened the door.

“Why? You can’t interrupt me like this.” His voice was low and tense.

“Because I’m gonna find Ghost Boy. Tell me where Yuuri is.” Yuri used every ounce of commanding power he had to convince Viktor with naught but the sound of his voice. He wasn’t sure it was going to work, stomach sloshing inside of him with nerves.

“He’s teaching right now.”

“I don’t care. Come on.”

“If you interrupt him he’s going to be angry.” Viktor himself looked angry and…something else Yuri couldn’t quite place. Regretful? Secretive?

“Viktor, come the fuck on.” Yuri’s voice was raised in a way that made him feel Lilia’s eyes on him from all the way on the other side of the city. He shut her out of his mind as soon as she appeared, not wanting to think about how his behavior would rub her the wrong way.

“7th and Manning. At Washington Square.” Viktor looked resigned to his Yuri-temper fate, giving in.

“Fuck.”

Yuri turned as Viktor closed his door, preparing to walk to the other side of the city again. Sweat trickled down his back.

 

* * *

 

The glass of Yuuri’s dance studio doors stood no chance for an impassioned Plisetsky.

Yuri pushed through and walked into the lobby, decorated in a horribly boring clean and modern style – like a brand new doctor’s office with side tables between every couple of chairs and fake potted plants adorning said tables. The receptionists’ desk was empty but Yuri skipped right over the little silver bell and walked right down the hall ahead of him. Three studio doors were visible, one on the right, one on the left, and one at the end of hall. Music tinkled out from the one at the end.

Yuri burst through the shimmery glass door of the studio at the end of the hall, registering only for a second that Yuuri was both mid- plié and in front of a class full of not children but damn-near toddlers. The oldest looked to be about six.

“It’s fucking ballet!” He yelled anyway, all hope for a gentle entrance left behind long ago. It was probably back on the train, taking up a seat.

Yuuri stumbled, only just saving himself from falling on his ass.

“Yuuri, listen, I figured it out!” Yuri stepped into the studio as the children, dressed in pale pinks and whites scurried away from him with confused looks on their faces. Yuuri, too, looked as confused as them.

Yuuri pushed Yuri back into the hallway, a stern and frustrated look on his face. Yuri would have been intimidated if Yuuri wasn’t dressed in leggings and a compression shirt, looking like some rich parent’s wet dream – a sweet and shy boy that would take their kids away from them for an hour or two of wine-induced peace regardless of the time of day. Yuuri had a gold ring on a delicate gold chain around his neck that bounced against his chest as they stumbled out of the studio together.

“Are you alright? What’s going on?” Yuri’s face was twisted with concern now that they were alone. His surprise still lingered somewhere in his eyes even as he looked Yuri up and down for obvious signs of a concussion which was the only rational explanation for his behavior.

“I fucking figured it out!” Yuri repeated, waving his hands in the air. “I figured it out on my own. It’s ballet. It’s how I’m gonna do it. You just gotta let me dance.”

“You really shouldn’t have interrupted me. The kids…” He trailed off, gesturing lamely towards the closed door. Yeah, yeah, the kids got an earful but this was important  _ goddamnit. _

Yuuri was giving his best  _ I’m-Not-Mad-I’m-just-Disappointed _ look and Yuri imagined that he must have been raised by a good family if he was able to put it on so well despite not having children of his own. His eyebrows were furrowed and his arms were crossed, his mouth a thin line on his face but Yuri pressed on, too excited to stop now.

“It’s how I’m going to find the boy on the motorcycle. If I can clear my head enough by dancing like I used to I can fucking find him. You need to help me!” Yuri reached out to grab Yuuri’s arms, gripping his biceps, a feeling the strong muscle that was hidden underneath his skin.

“This whole time everyone else has been trying to tell me how to do it but now I finally –“

“You really think this will work?” Yuuri asked, cutting him off. He still looked stern, leveling his glasses-clad eyes to Yuri’s.

“Yes.” Yuri left no room for debate, he spat the word with all his might. He was sure.

Yuuri looked him up and down, eyeing his scuffed boots and tight, frayed jeans, and the shirt that hung loose on his body. 

“Let me finish this class and I’ll cancel the rest of the day.” Yuuri sighed his answer but still his eyes seemed to bore into Yuri’s soul. For a moment it was a heavier look than even Lilia could manage. Yuri stood underneath it, back straight and ready.

As Yuuri went back to his children in the studio Yuri changed in the bathroom, vibrating with tension, like a guitar string being plucked over and over. He knew he needed to calm down but release wouldn’t come – trepidation, anxiety, and performance pressure mixed together inside of him into a nervous, nauseous sludge that threatened to fall out of his mouth as either word vomit or real vomit at any moment.

Yuri pulled his black leggings on over his shaved legs. They were old and the cheap jersey had begun to pill where his thighs touched. They were nothing like the spandex ones Yuuri had on. His shirt, too, was just a black t-shirt that he no longer wore in public for the holes and paint stains it had been given. With his hair half-up and black socks on instead of dance shoes, which he no longer owned, Yuri stepped out of the bathroom and into the hallway where children were leaving. They looked up at him, fearful. His smile wobbled.

In the studio Yuuri and Yuri began to reflect one another as they moved through stretches, mostly in silence. The large mirror on the wall created four of them, four black-clad boys moving through their daily exercises in search of something a little better at the end of it than they had in the beginning.

The pale hardwood floor shined under Yuri’s feet, freshly waxed. The mirror glittered and the barre, too, gleamed as it was held up on steel supports. A window at the side of the studio was open and the gauzy white curtains in front of it billowed in the wind ever so often, cooling the studio into the perfect temperature.

As they began to move through elements of an actual dance, instead of just stretched, Yuri saw how skilled a teacher Yuuri was even though they barely used words to communicate. When Yuri fell behind Yuuri slowed and when Yuri tripped Yuuri would stop, and show him the footing, and when Yuri mastered something with ease Yuuri held the thought in his head –  _ After all this time and still this good? _ – without saying anything.

Their feet tapped out a practiced routine. Yuri followed where Yuuri led, not asking questions, but trusting as they worked together. His anxiety was slowly dropping down his throat until he couldn’t feel it anymore. He knew he was nowhere where he needed to be but so far he already felt more progress than he had sitting under to ice cold eyes of Lilia.

“When exactly did you stop dancing?” Yuuri asked. He sounded like he was trying to be casual, his voice even and not too loud in the silence of the studio, interrupting only the sound of the curtain moving. He sounded like he was genuinely curious and disguising it as small talk.

“When I was twelve. Mom said it was too expensive but I think she was afraid of making me girly or gay or whatever. Unfortunately for her…” Yuri trailed off, letting his moving hand continue the sentence where his mouth didn’t.  _ It happened anyway  _ said his hand, and his elbow, and his shoulder. For a long time he had been ashamed of these little pieces of his life, embarrassed by what he wanted both artistically and for himself but here in the studio he felt himself opening like the window to his left. He blamed Yuuri’s kind eyes and left it at that.

They continued, for awhile, in silence. Yuri’s head began to clear, slowly, of its fog as his muscles required more and more energy to move. His legs burned where his mind refused thoughts and he was grateful – it meant he was right. He just had to keep going, keep pushing, to keep working hard in a different way until he wasn’t thinking at all.

If King JJ thought he needed to let go of his past then this dance became an ode to it instead – he was back where he started, in some ways. His old dance studio, helmed by a bitter and crumpled alcoholic of a woman, wrinkled and bent before her time, gave him a spark that had always burned inside of him even as his mother tried to snuff it out. He was letting go by reclaiming, if such a thing was possible.

His feet pattered across the floor as he moved, feeling awkward and stiff and right.

“Why aren’t you wearing your wedding ring?” Yuri asked Yuuri, moving in perfect sync right in front of him.

Yuuri paused in his dance for just a moment before returning to moving in silence, and glanced down to where his ring hung and bounced against his chest as he breathed heavily. They hadn’t taken a break.

“Come on, I told you  _ my _ tragic past.” Yuri said, stilling for the first time in a better part of an hour. This time it was Yuuri who followed, letting both his feet hit the ground. Yuri’s muscles thanked him, hot and tired from more exercise than he’d gotten in years, and he wiped sweat from his brow.

Yuuri shifted his weight to one foot and then the other, seemingly uncomfortable, before he moved back into position. They still had no music, just the rustle of the curtain and the sound of cars driving by but their rhythm only faltered significantly that one time.

“When I was a kid I wanted to dance more than anything. I made a deal that seemed alright at the time. I’ve never, ah, been rather confident.” Yuuri said this as he stretched into a perfect arabesque, nearly en pointe.

“I thought I wouldn’t succeed without coming to America to train so I agreed to a deal with the Fae back home. In exchange for the opportunity I would forget my ‘greatest love’ every three years after I discovered it. I didn’t really think anyone would ever love me back so…it was easy. I was in Detroit the next year.”

Yuuri sounded like he was giving a practiced speech; it was a story he had told a hundred times that still dripped hurt off the edges even after all the time he had had to accept it.

“So you just woke up and forgot Viktor?” Yuri’s voice was hushed as he held his much weaker pose, working foot flat and free leg not even close to horizontal. He shook with the effort of standing there as a poor double to Yuuri’s practiced and perfect posture. He could see himself wobbling in the mirror.

“He’s…I remember feeling love.” Yuuri stepped out of the arabesque, flitting across the floor while Yuri trailed after him in a strange cat and mouse.

“But his face is a black spot. He left the night before it was going to happen and wrote me a letter telling me all about it. It’s happened twice now but every time is like a small, three-year relationship.”

Yuuri stepped to a small speaker in the corner of the room, a blotch against the otherwise pristine white walls and pale floor. As he fiddled with his phone Yuri panted, waiting for music to fill the room.

“You’re a fucking moron.” Yuri blurted, tiredness making it harder for him to control himself now that he understood what exactly was going on.

Yuuri jerked up, looking stunned, his glasses slipping down his nose and mouth dropped open into a little ‘o’. His ring glittered in the sunlight where it swung on its chain.

“You’re thinking of breaking up with him? Over this?”

“Let’s get back to – “

“No. Look. That husband you’ve got is more in love with you than anything. You’ve gotta learn how to work around this. So fucking what if your relationship is different?”

“It hurts him.”

“And being away from him would be better? I assume he knew when he married you.”

“I don’t remember marrying him.” His words cut like a knife through the tense air that surrounded the dancers with their feet nailed to the ground.

Yuri and Yuuri stood, mirroring each other again but this time not purposefully. Their postures were different – Yuuri defensive while Yuri aggressed, feet planted and wide, angry at this dumb fuck of a man who couldn’t see what was right in front of his face.

The music that played as they stood still was haunting. A woman’s voice trailed over harps and horns in an operatic nature, though her tone was as fragile as a glass heart. The music swirled around them, seemingly caressing Yuri where he stood in the middle of the empty studio. He was surprised to find his heart beating at a slow, consistent pace even though he was huffing and puffing at the idiot Yuuri in front of him, who looked sheepish and awkward the way he had the first time they went to Lilia’s together.

“He knew what he was getting into. You fucking think about that while we keep going.” Yuri said, letting the words drip out of his mouth – he couldn’t stop them if he tried. He fell back into the position he had been holding when they started their pause, ready to pick up where they left off.

Yuri and Yuuri began to dance, again, but this time to the music that was on repeat. Yuri hadn’t realized but their choreography from the earlier, silent, practice melted into the music. He didn’t know it yet, he still had to follow Yuuri’s instructions, but the dance became easier and easier as they repeated. He could do the beginning without following closely. He was damp with sweat as he transitioned into the middle part, a second act, and his arms felt like lead on his shoulders as he lifted them over and over under Yuuri’s eyes.

The white curtain swayed in the wind as they danced to the end. They didn’t stop, despite how tired they both were, red faces matching like their outfits did, through the music and the cool air that swirled around Yuri, making his hair sway around his face.

Even as his feet began to ache he moved and moved and moved until his chest felt tight and he could see nothing but his own green eyes in the mirror in front of him.

Still, then, he went through the motions. He tried to dance cleaner every time, lifting his leg higher even when it hurt, and he pushed through every mental barrier he had set up over five years of resentment. He pictured her, his mom, as his feet began to stomp, as he could no longer be light and graceful like he used to be before everything changed, and for a moment he forgave her his pain because he was here now and that was what mattered to him.

Her face became Grandpa, who became Viktor, who became Lilia, who became Yuuri in some kind of swirl of every piece of advice he had ever gotten.

He saw  _ him _ again, the boy on the motorcycle. He let the boy’s face grow larger in his mind until he could nearly taste the sweat of his skin. He sought out his aura and let it consume him. This moment was the difference, after everything it was now that mattered – through all of his trying and in all of the advice he had been given he had been attempting to reach out to the boy only to push him away. He allowed the boy to come to him, now, let his body envelop his own. He felt the warmth of the boy’s skin on his, possibly imagining it and possibly feeling it for real as he spun and touched the curtain at the wall. His eyes closed, focused only on the boy’s golden skin and he went down hard and fast as he got trapped in the gauzy, cool cloth. His eyes snapped open as he fell and he saw brown eyes looking back at him from the mirror. Only the mirror was different – it wasn’t a seamless pane of glass that Yuuri stood in front of, toying with his ring, it was tarnished brass with ornate decoration and jewels set into it.

The boy stared back at him from the mirror. His jaw was set firm and Yuri could feel where his teeth hurt from the pressure.

His eyes were circled by dark rings like he hadn’t slept and his hands gripped the edges of the mirror. He was hunched, or rather Yuri was hunched inside his body and couldn’t get up even though he was in control now. Yuri tried to move the boy from where he stood but he couldn’t – his muscles and bones and sinew were locked over, bent and clutching the mirror by some oppressive  _ other _ force inside of him Yuri couldn’t find or picture or name.

Yuri struggled inside the boy’s body. Nothing.

His eyes were bloodshot black pools in his face as Yuri stared into the mirror, unable to look anywhere else. In the reflection around the face he was staring at he could see cluttered shelves that were stuffed full of all number of objects - dolls next to dishes next to TVs next to books. They all looked dusty even in the dim light of whatever kind of room he was in.

Yuri shoved against whatever was holding him back, wrenching his hands away from the mirror with all his might but every ounce of broken, perfunctory strength he had was left behind in the studio inside his own body, likely lying tangled in the curtain while Yuuri wrung his hands. He still hadn’t learned what happened to his own body through all of this.

Yuri’s jaw – or, rather, the boy’s jaw popped open. It wasn’t his doing that made the boy’s lips move and for the first time Yuri understood how unnerving the feeling of being utterly controlled was. He had no choice but to listen as the body he was in worked against his will, tongue curling around teeth until sounds came out, strangled and guttural.

“Get…out.” Was all that the boy said. Or was it the other force making him speak? Yuri couldn’t tell - everything was bleeding together inside his mind, making the scene begin to feel like a watercolor painting.  What he could tell, though, was that there were t hree entities inhabiting this body– the boy himself, Yuri, and the other pressure that squeezed Yuri small inside a skull that didn’t belong to him.

Yuri tried to take a calming breath inside of a chest that didn’t belong to him but could only latch onto the small gasps he was given – would he die like this? Unable to breathe in another’s body?

He dug deep inside of himself and felt, with all his power, for this third being that was living in the boy’s body. He could feel it, it was almost tangible, and it was hard as stone, walled up around the inside of skin like it wanted to keep Yuri inside. Perhaps it wanted to keep something else out. Either way it was there and it was hurting the boy whose jaw had clenched up again, grinding his own teeth down to dust, while Yuri rooted around in his brain, looking for an escape hatch.

“Blondie, you gotta help.” The boy said into the mirror. Yuri could no longer tell if the panic rising inside of him belonged to the body he was in or himself. Being addressed so directly sent shivers down his spine - he was no longer simply trapped physically but mentally, too. He couldn’t think past the brown eyes he was staring into - how could he been seen like this?

The brown eyes in the mirror flicked sideways, allowing Yuri to get small glimpses of the room they were in. Only, it wasn’t a room but a dark and crowded warehouse, stuffed to the gills with thousands of objects on old metal shelving and the damp concrete floor they stood on.

The boy’s eyes came back to the mirror.

“Blondie’s not going to help you.” He said. This time his voice wasn’t pained or guttural, it was easy and free, like it was just a normal thing to say to yourself.

The pressure around Yuri doubled, and tripled, until he was being squeezed so tightly he could hardly breathe again. He struggled against the vice he was in, hardly able to breathe from the lungs he was now connected to. He called up his own face in his mind, trying to reach out to his own body and escape. He gasped for air, or maybe the boy did, it was all mixed up in his head now and he could hear laughter as if it were in an echo chamber - he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Maybe the boy’s mouth was laughing, maybe it was all inside his head, but he felt surrounded. 

He pulled away, again, but went nowhere. 

He was trapped. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey yall, sorry this took a minute, things are getting hectic at work so my updates for the next month will be a little slower. We're almost to the end, though!! I hope you guys are as excited as I am. 
> 
> If you've been enjoying this series please consider leaving me a comment - I've been really struggling to write lately and I need some encouragement. Sometimes life just be like that, ya know. 
> 
> Thanks again to Voxane and KinoGlowWorm for helping me through these chapters, as always. Yall are amazing.

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to KinoGlowWorm for listening to all of my half baked ideas and improving them immediately. If you're not reading The Ghost with the Hammer in His Hand you're missing out. 
> 
> you can find me on tumblr under the same name.


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